


And Now You're Mine

by L_awlietxoxx



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: All the ingredients for teenage witch Reylo, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, And plain old tender Reylo smut, Bisexual Ben Solo, Body Swap, F/M, Heterosexual Sex, I promise, Like tons of Reylo fluff, M/M, Male Homosexuality, Porn With Plot, Possible dubcon because not all parties know about the body swap, Rey and Ben are both clueless, Rimming, Sex Magic, Smut of various types clues them in, This is part fluff part filth and part witchy worldbuilding, Voyeurism, Witchcraft, Witches in training, and also lots of fluff, and confused about their feelings, because body swap, but all parties would be and are very much into it, endgame reylo, teenage witches, which Rey participates in, with some Ben/Poe as the means to get there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2020-12-27 23:55:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21127358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/L_awlietxoxx/pseuds/L_awlietxoxx
Summary: A Teenage Witch AU including besotted idiots, a determined Rey, a diffident Ben, a rascally-but-ultimately-helpful Poe, spells gone wrong, spells gone right, hidden affections, free sexual mores, misunderstandings, and flower petals.“Ben, we all struggle in our own ways. We’re all trying to make sense of expectations and abilities that are brand new. You’re not alone - not nearly. The coven chose you for training because the Elders saw something extraordinary in you. We all do.”Ben is silent for a long moment. He looks only at her and she looks back, trying to decipher the expression on his face that might border wistful.He finally speaks in a hushed tone, “You never struggle, Rey. You’re always so…” He bites his lip, seeming to wrangle for the right words. He finally says in a low voice near a whisper, “Formidable.”(Kinktober Day 21 | Prompts: Voyeurism, Rimming, Body swap)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> There are no praises generous enough for [JenfysNest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenfysNest/pseuds/JenfysNest) who not only beta'd this entire thing but made me the gorgeous mood board I am 200% obsessed with! Thank you so so much! <3
> 
> Praise also goes, of course, to Courtney for being the fearless leader and tireless organizer of this whole collection. And to all of you who lent support along the way <3
> 
> This is going to be 3 parts, because apparently I have no self-control whatsoever. :') The entire thing is finished, so the whole thing will be up by the end of the week! This is half wild, half v soft, and all difficult to explain.  
.... Hope a few people like it!! :')

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/181686886@N04/48939158727/in/dateposted/)

Rey started witches’ training a mere three months ago and her life is already changed. Three things she knows for certain:

One: This ain’t Hogwarts. Waiting for a coven to offer her a place in their ranks was an unpredictable, terrifying waiting game. With a witch for a mother (and a human father who’d learned over the years simply not to ask questions), Rey had at least known of the covens’ secret existence. Some disguised themselves as universities, theatre groups, art collectives in cities; others lived more freely out in the Midwest. But sworn to the most extreme secrecy to keep themselves cloaked from human knowledge – with plenty of secret-keeping spells in place for good measure – Rey had no way of knowing how many there were or how one might find her. Her mother had passed word of Rey’s birth into the shadow world, but after leaving her own coven for a mortal life, she no longer had a voice to solicit a place for her daughter. Instead, Rey had to wait, hoping and praying a coven would claim her; give her proper training and purpose for the power becoming increasingly more difficult to control. Finally, on the day of her eighteenth birthday, Rey came home to words burned into her bedroom floor:

_You are chosen. _

_The New York Coven._

Two: Rey is considerably more powerful than others of her age. She and the seven other children (though a range of ages from 18 to 20, the elders call all new initiates “children” until their training is complete and they’ve proven themselves worthy of joining the coven for life) shared lessons and trainings since their arrival in the aged brick buildings of Columbia University, secretly overtaken by the New York Coven. Rey often finds she somehow instinctively _knows_ how to spark the fire, levitate herself inches off the ground, or charm a classmate into infatuation before the instructor even finishes their demonstration. Rey had never imagined she would possess any special talents within the shadow world. She simply wanted to belong. She wanted kin she would never have to hide her powers or any aspect of herself from. After a childhood cut off from others of her kind, Rey is fiercely determined to carve out her place in the coven that offered her family. Rey doesn’t mean to draw attention, but she can’t deny the warmth of fulfillment when the instructor claps and beams at her, or when her peers crowd around her in wonder. 

Three: Ben Solo is both the best and worst thing that has ever happened to her. The day she met him – 

Oh – hi, you’re in the room next door.  
Um, I think so, yes. I just got here.  
Me too. I met Poe, who’s in the room just there, but no one else yet. Well, no one but you.  
You’re my first – the first I’m meeting. I’m Rey. Hi.  
Ben. Glad to be your first. 

– she’d sunk into a panic of _‘oh my, are all male witches like this? How could I have gone my whole life being unjustly deprived of boys of my kind? Oh no, how will I ever adapt to living with the coven if every man is this beautiful?’_ By the end of the day, Rey had met Poe and Finn as well as some of the coven leaders and quickly learned with some measure of relief that _‘okay, it’s just Ben.’_ Throughout the first week, her relief was overtaken by a helpless, crystallized fixation. 

_It’s Ben’s deep, expressive eyes. Ben’s lush, pink lips. Ben’s height and massive hands. Ben’s deep, rich voice. Ben’s thick hair, blacker than night. Ben’s way of leaning down towards her like the gentle bow of a weeping willow branch when they talk._

But then came the lesson about the channeling and centering of one’s power through the coupling. The elder giving the lesson explained with serene sincerity that the coven live joyous and powerful lives through open and frequent intercourse. Members of the coven have shared their beds with practically all other members at some point or another. (Rey had to work very, _very_ hard not to let her gaze wander to where Ben sat just behind her.) Most take many partners, but occasionally two members will mate exclusively for life. Rituals and spells involving intercourse are frequently undertaken. Some are performed in the presence of the coven; some include many of the coven’s participation. At this point, Rey had had to fight down a tremble of thrill and heat. Assuming they both passed through training, sharing a coven with Ben would likely mean that sooner or later…

Returning to her room in one of the dorm buildings that night, Rey found herself wondering perhaps how soon ‘soon’ could be. If intercourse is common – _encouraged_ even – to reinvigorate one’s powers, perhaps Ben might want to start living the way of the coven already…

But moving towards her door – across a shared living space from Ben and Poe’s bedrooms – a noise froze Rey in place. A soft, _breathy_ noise. Then a louder, sharper one. It didn’t take Rey long to realize that two of her brethren had already had the same idea. Looking around the four-bedroom apartment, Jessika’s room was dark and empty, door open. Poe’s light was on, the door ajar as if he’d just left it… A distinctively _male_ grunt from behind Ben’s closed door – certainly not Ben’s velvety voice – confirmed Rey’s suspicions. She flushed hot and cold all at once. 

Rey shoved herself into her own room and closed the door behind her. Dropping her bag, and then herself, down to her bed, she laid for a few minutes awash in chaotic, conflicting feelings. There was a grey, mournful disappointment swelling in her chest, making everything seem heavy. But there was also a strange, erratic pulse through her whole body, knowing what Ben was currently doing only two rooms away. Rey couldn’t hear anything, but she found she could picture it with alarming clarity. The details didn’t quite matter – whether it was Ben spread beneath or thrusting from above – but _him_ she could imagine perfectly. His red, kiss-blushed lips. The rippling muscles along his back and shoulders as he either filled or was filled. His big hands circling thighs or wrists. How his hips moved, giving or receiving.

Rey’s hand worked its way into her jeans before she had the conscious thought. It didn’t take long, once she imagined it was Ben’s tongue against her. She came with her free hand pressed over her mouth. 

Later, she heard Poe leaving Ben’s room. Heard them bantering with casual laughter. 

No one mentioned it the next day. When Ben knocked on Rey’s door and asked if she wanted to walk to class together, she opened the door to find the same soft smile he usually reserved for her – the one that crinkled his cheeks and made Rey feel light enough to float without any witchcraft at all. They walked together, close at each other’s sides, Ben still a willow tree bending towards her. On their first day, the children had learned the willow's sacred importance to the coven and the magical properties it imbues. Rey had never been able to untangle that from Ben in her head – sinewy, graceful, otherworldly. Rey smiled up at him, tried to say something clever enough to coax out one of the rare laughs that lit up his eyes in the way that made her heart stutter, and she simply couldn’t get the questions out. 

_So, do you ever want women? Do you ever want me?_  


* * *

  
“But would you think it’s unethical? Is it wrong, if the subject doesn’t know?”

Across the couch, Poe throws up his hands. “This is all a moot point. The exchange of consciousness spell is one of the hardest in all of witchcraft. None of us will probably ever even get close to the possibility of casting it.”

His tall frame and long legs spilling from an armchair, Ben’s gaze levels at Rey. 

“I wouldn’t be so quick to say that. Rey probably could.”

Rey can hold Ben’s gaze for only a moment before she has to flee to the sight of her hands in her lap instead. Why do his eyes always have to be so _gentle_ when he looks at her? She’s frustrated by the rush of heat that blooms everywhere at his words. 

She quickly channels it back into the debate. 

“My question isn’t ‘would you cast it?’ My question is ‘would you call it wrong?’”

Poe looks thoughtful, Rey’s question lingering in the air until Ben speaks up. 

“I think the ‘ethics’ of it are immaterial. If one of us ever mastered the power to perform the exchange of consciousness spell, I would say they’ve earned the right to use it. We’re born with these powers. Why should we be expected to second-guess our natural gifts against some shifting, subjective idea of what’s moral or immoral? Most of those concepts belong to humans, anyway.” 

Ben shrugs, lifting his arms to drape them across the back of the chair. Rey does her utmost to ignore how his wide shoulders strain beneath his black t shirt. 

“Besides, I don’t see any big difference between this and something like a simple charm spell. The subject would probably never realize it happened. It’s not our problem nor our responsibility that we’re more powerful than humans, so we shouldn’t feel guilty for it.”

Poe leans forward, drawn in now. “What if the subject were one of us?”

Ben blinks. “Another witch? Is that even possible?”

Poe lifts one shoulder. “I don’t see why not. Our physiology and basic brain chemistry is the same. It might be harder to dupe a fellow witch into drinking the potion for the spell, but in theory? Sure.”

One side of Ben’s mouth slowly curls. “Now that would be an interesting experiment.”

“I’m sure someone’s tried it before,” Rey interjects. “We’re having the second lecture on it tomorrow. I’ll ask.”

“I wonder if your power would feel different,” Poe muses. “If _you_ would feel different.”

“I imagine it’d be worlds different,” Rey responds immediately. “I’ve sensed my powers for as long as I can remember. They’re a very distinctive presence inside me. It used to terrify me as a kid, when I could sense something was awake and I didn’t know what it was or what to do with it. But now, I don’t know what I’d do if it ever stopped… humming the way it does.”

“Humming?” 

Rey looks at Ben, finds him watching her with open interest. 

“Mm. Yeah, that’s the best way I can describe it.”

“That’s probably why you’re so good with your powers. You were aware of them so early. I only felt mine for the first time around 13. But I wouldn’t describe them as ‘humming.’ Not at all. They’re more…” He takes his arms from the back of the chair, swirls his hands in a chaotic, tumbling motion. “A mini storm that never eases.”

“That sounds… tiring.” Without realizing it, Rey’s leaning forward in intrigue. They’re all here to learn how to channel, control, and cultivate their powers in the same way, so she finds it fascinating to think they each feel the life of their powers in such disparate ways. “Like you have to wrangle it under control before you can tap into it.”

Ben smiles wryly. His gaze lowers from Rey as his hand moves to finger a tiny rip in his jeans. 

“You could certainly say it’s been hard. My dad would agree.” Ben falls silent, though it seems apparent from the crease between his brows and the focused retrospection on his face that he’s at the precipice of divulging more. Rey and Poe both wait, immobile. “Things got out of control once, when I was 16 and angry about something. I almost killed him.”

“Shit,” Poe breathes. “I’m so sorry.”

Rey can’t say anything at all. Breathing suddenly seems difficult – through the almost overwhelming urge to cross the space to Ben. To thread her fingers between his so he stops nervously opening the hole in his jeans wider. To cradle his sullen face between her hands, stroke her fingers through his hair, and whisper how strong and beautiful he is. That his powers are only an extension of all _he_ is, and it will get easier every day. 

Finally, Rey manages in a whisper. “But you’ve been fine in lessons. You seem to be in perfect control.”

Ben stops picking at the tear in his jeans. Instead, he starts running his fingers idly up and down the seam along the inner thigh of his jeans. Rey knows he isn’t doing it on purpose, but it’s driving her _insane._

“The spikes are kind of unpredictable, but I can usually keep them stifled now. But after so much of that, sometimes it’s hard to tap into it at all. These couple months of training definitely haven’t been easy.”

Ben shifts in the chair, seemingly eager to escape the attention. 

“What about you, Poe?”

“Me?”

“What does your power feel like? Rey’s hums, mine has temper tantrums, and yours?”

Poe leans back on his side of the couch. Managing a suave smirk at both of them at the same time, he folds his hands together behind his head. 

“Like a starship cruising smooth.”

The other two burst into laughter. Rey tosses a pillow at Poe’s face while Ben mutters, “You’re such a sleaze.”

  


* * *

  


“But what do your powers _feel_ like?” Rey asks Finn and Rose later that night as she sits outside with them both, sharing a Very Grown Up thank-you-very-much picnic dinner of crackers, salami, and cheese. 

Rose ‘hmmmm’s around a bite of cheese before deciding, “Rain after a hot summer’s day. Letting them out always feels so cleansing.”

Finn takes a bit longer, but finally decides on, “An extra heartbeat.”

To much laughter, Rey retells Poe’s answer to the same question. 

“How has it been with them, by the way?” Finn asks around a cracker. “After Jessika dropped out, you doing alright rooming on your own with two guys?”

“Oh, it’s been fine. They’re both great.” 

Rey catches Rose squinting at her, and realizes she might have answered too quickly. She sighs and leans back on the blanket, willing her face not to flush as her thoughts stray towards both her roommates _together._ “Really. I love them both.”

Finn pokes her side. “Especially _Ben._”

Rey levels him a vicious glare. Finn laughs and holds his hands up in mock innocence. “Sorry, sorry, I know I promised I’d stop teasing you.”

“I really don’t blame you, Rey,” Rose says in a voice that’s a little airy. “He is very pretty. And very tall.”

“Hey, I’m right here!”

Rose leans over to give Finn a conciliatory kiss on the cheek. 

Rey rolls her eyes fondly, but her stomach does a bit of an uncomfortable lurch. It seems the seven “children” are all pairing up. Rey knows very well, thanks to Rose’s lack of filter, that she and Finn started experimenting with coupling rituals weeks ago (after she told Rey every detail of their first time with stars in her eyes, while Rey was torn being touched and mortified). Rose had also shared her conviction that Hux and Gwen were hooking up, which left everyone accounted for except...

“Guys, I think I’m going to turn in.”

“What! But there’s a whole half of this cheese block left!” Rose protests, indignant. 

“Sorry, I’ve hit my cheese quota.”

“There’s no such thing as a cheese quota,” Rose mumbles, sulking as she shovels an extra large chunk into her mouth as if to soothe the cheese’s feelings.

“See you tomorrow, peanut,” Finn waves as Rey stands up. 

Rey smiles at them both before setting off back towards the dorm. 

Really, she knows she doesn’t need to worry. Even if all her peers double in strength thanks to all the sex that seems to be happening, Rey knows she could still keep up. Her permanent place in the coven is all but certain. She’s developing good relationships with the elders, and she knows she’s all the instructors’ favorite. And besides, once she completes training in two years, she’ll be introduced to the whole coven and surely then there will be plenty of people to meet and experiment with. Maybe she might even find a mate, like she knows some deep part of her yearns for. A kind of belonging that’s unquestionable.

Unbidden, a deeper, infuriating part of her matches Ben’s face to the word. Rey tries to shove the image away as she opens the door to her dorm building, but her brain doesn’t seem to want to listen. Suddenly, it starts supplying her with all kinds of unhelpful fantasies. Rolling over to Ben’s sleeping face beside her in the morning. Ben laughing with her across a table for two. Ben focusing as Rey helps him master a spell. Ben showing her the creased cheeks of his smile. And then – Ben above her. Ben moaning her name, whispering how good she feels…

Rey is only half aware when she unlocks their door and enters the apartment. It’s dark, except for a sliver of light trickling from Poe’s bedroom where the door has been left ajar. Rey takes a step towards her own room, then freezes in place when she hears the noise. An unmistakable noise. 

Ben. Moaning. 

Rey’s body floods with all manner of reactions as the fantasies that had just been spooling through her head suddenly greet her senses. He makes another sound, loud this time and more helpless, and Rey can barely breathe. It glides over her like hands caressing through her clothes. 

All sense of caution swept away in an instant, Rey tiptoes just a few feet further into the room. She stops just shy of where the beam of light spills from Poe’s bedroom – just so she can see around the door and to the bed…

It takes Rey a long moment to process exactly what she’s seeing. When it finally makes sense, she presses fingers to her mouth to stop any sound escaping her. 

Ben is bent forward, knees under him and wide chest dipped low. His hands are fisted in the blankets, head tossing from side to side as he pants audibly. Poe is sprawled behind him, leaning up on his elbows with his hands raised to hold Ben open. Poe’s face is pressed in tight, and when Rey manages to drag her gaze from the expanse of _all_ of Ben, she focuses in and realizes she can _see_ Poe’s tongue at work. She can see when Poe stops circling and sweeping across; when he tilts his head for better access and his tongue starts pressing inside instead. 

The change in approach ripples visibly through Ben’s body. Rey can’t look away from how every inch of him trembles, his hands tightening in the blankets as his noises rise in pitch. Ben’s voice is so deep, and yet Poe’s tongue drags out sounds like mewls. Mindless, keening noises that trickle straight into Rey’s underwear. 

Poe keeps working the larger boy open with his tongue, until Ben’s outright whining and trembling so hard Poe has to hold him still at the hips. At that point, Poe pulls back and urges in a low voice, “Roll over for me.”

Ben moves shakily, but obeys. When he drops to his back, Rey can see how flushed his face is. She can see the rosy blush spreading all the way down the pale, creamy skin of his neck and chest. She can see how his thick hair curls against his sweat-gleaming face. She can see the smoothly defined muscles of his chest and how his nipples look all pink and hard. 

Then Poe slides his hands into action and when a sharp gasp escapes Ben, she assumes Poe’s fingers have picked up where his tongue left off. 

Rey’s gaze travels further – to where Ben is fully hard and already leaking, leaving shiny smears against his stomach. Rey feels something like heat lightning shoot through her when she takes in how big he is. How thick. She really doesn’t think she’d be able to fit him in her hand – not even in _two_ hands. 

Through her shorts, Rey cups the pulsing heat between her legs. She’s afraid that if she touches herself, she’ll make noise before she can help it and the boys will know-

“Ready yet?” Ben asks, already sounding breathless.

“Of course I am, but you’re still tight.”

“Just start already,” Ben grits. “Fuck me.”

Rey has to physically press her knuckles into her mouth to keep from groaning aloud at the sound of Ben’s deep, rasping voice around those words.

Poe complies, shifting himself up to kneel between Ben’s legs. Ben spreads and folds his legs for better access, one curling around Poe’s hip and the other lifting all the way to his shoulder. Rey think it looks awkward, at first. 

Poe uses a hand to guide himself in, and she hears the distinct hitch of breath from Ben when Poe starts pushing inside. Poe grits his teeth, biting out a swear and then, “You’re so fucking tight. You sure it’s not hurting?”

Ben’s biting his lip hard, eyes closed and chest heaving as Poe’s hips draw closer and closer to bottoming out. 

“No more than I want it to. Fuck, keep going.”

Rey watches the space between them grow smaller, until she can’t see Poe’s cock at all anymore. It’s swallowed up completely inside Ben’s body. And then Poe grits his teeth, emits a loud grunt, and with full-body effort he slides halfway free before plunging back in, hard. 

Ben makes a noise too loud and desperate to be called a moan. Poe grips Ben’s thighs to hold him there, one leg at Poe’s waist and one at his shoulder, and starts moving in ragged, relentless thrusts that start shallow until they grow longer, Ben quaking and writhing against the bed as they grow deeper. 

It’s not anything near awkward anymore. With her knuckles between her teeth and fingertips pressing hard against the inner seam of her shorts, the only thought Rey can process is that she’s never seen anything hotter in her life. Couldn’t even _imagine_ anything hotter than the visceral energy and _power_ of what she’s witnessing. Even in the way Ben’s back arches, how his toes curl over Poe’s shoulder, the breathy noises he makes like Poe’s cock might split him open completely – there’s an indescribable might to it. To the sight of the huge, beautiful boy Rey’s become so infatuated with being pleasured so thoroughly. 

One of Poe’s hands moves to grip the base of Ben’s cock, offering the dark-flushed length some relief from where it had been slapping Ben’s stomach with the force of Poe’s thrusts. Ben groans deep, deep in his chest, fingers scrabbling in the blankets as his head tips back. 

“Such a gorgeous cock,” Poe croons as he starts to pump Ben in time with each drive into his body. “So thick and full. Hard to believe, but you’re just as good inside. So deep for fucking.”

Ben pants roughly, body rocking between the hand working him and the cock still fucking deeper into him. 

“So wet,” Poe murmurs, his thumb sliding up to smear around all the precum trickling from the head of Ben’s cock. Rey sees Poe look up towards Ben’s face with devious purpose when he murmurs, barely audible, “You could give someone a hell of a fuck.”

Poe’s voice drops lower into a whisper as he leans down closer. His hips take on a new angle as he whispers words to Ben that Rey can’t make out. Whatever they are, they rip a desperate moan from Ben like nothing she’s heard before. Ben swears loud, and then every inch of his giant frame starts shaking. He cries out once more, and then Rey sees his release surging over Poe’s hand and splattering both their chests. Poe makes a few last hurried thrusts, before pulling out from Ben and maneuvering up so his own cum joins Ben’s between them. 

Both boys gasping for breath, Poe drops down to his back beside Ben. Neither of them look capable of moving any time soon, but through the haze of overwhelming arousal that seems to be blocking all her senses, Rey retains just enough instinct of self-preservation to realize she needs to move. Before one of them looks up and sees her…

While their breathing is still loud, Rey silently backs up towards her own room. She takes a long, torturous minute making sure the closing of her door makes absolutely no sound. 

The second she’s alone, Rey rips her shorts open and shoves her hand into her underwear. She bites down on her knuckles again as she pushes two fingers in all the way, pumping them fast and urgent as her thumb circles her clit. 

_Fuck._ The sight of Ben being thoroughly fucked like that. The _sounds_ he made. 

Rey’s never known anyone like him. Every single thing he does without clothes, no matter whether with her or not, drives her near out of her mind. She’s never felt attraction like this. Where all she wants is to feel and experience and _consume_ him in whatever way possible – _every_ way possible…

Rey comes hard against her own fingers. They’re Ben’s fingers of course, in her mind. But at the same time, she’s imagining his face contorted in pleasure. Pleasure that she gave him; pleasure that she shared with him.

  


* * *

  


“I know you can do it, Ben. Your powers are just there beneath the surface. Don’t be afraid to let them through.”

Rey can’t help looking towards where Coven Elder Holdo has stopped to provide Ben encouragement.

He’s been sitting in place for the duration of the lesson, focusing on the flower bud set before him that he’s meant to be coaxing into a fully-grown plant. 

At her own seat, Rey fidgets as if trying to hide the sight of the flowering rosebush on her own table. 

She hears Ben give a huff of frustration. 

“I’m sorry, Elder. I don’t know why I struggle so much.”

“There’s nothing to apologize for. Each of our powers come to us in different ways and at different times.”

“I just wish mine would come at the times I actually want it to. It’s mine, so shouldn’t it listen to me?”

“Perhaps you’re just calling it the wrong way. You need to learn its language. Do not simply make demands of your power – learn what it wants, too.”

Holdo moves on, and Ben continues frowning thunderously at the single flower sitting before him. 

When Holdo ends the lesson twenty minutes later, Ben doesn’t move. The only change in his flower is a slightly wilted look.

While the other children make for the door, Rey approaches where Poe leans against Ben’s desk. 

“Come on, we were gonna go for burgers.”

“Go on your own, Poe. I really just want to get this and I will if you leave me alone.” 

Poe holds his hands up, looking affronted. Rey steps forward and clears her throat. Poe turns and his face lights up. 

“Rey! You wanna get burgers with me?”

Rey doesn’t look at Poe – just at Ben, where he’s still sitting hunched over the wilted flower. 

“Um. I was actually going to offer… Ben, I’ll stay and help you, if you want.”

Ben looks up, his gaze finding Rey slowly. His expression is tentative, almost disbelieving. 

“You don’t have to,” he says softly, but not with much conviction.

“I don’t mind, really. I want to help.” With effort, Rey looks up at Poe. She finds him looking between her and Ben with a strange twinkle in his eye and a sly smile spreading across his face. “Sorry, Poe. Looks like you’re on your own for burgers.”

“You know, that’s just fine. I’ll get by. You help him out, okay, Rey?”

Rey almost misses the way Ben sharply breathes _“Poe”_ between his teeth. Poe gives Rey a friendly slap on the shoulder, the same to Ben accompanied by a “Good luck, man,” then makes his way to the door.

The door closes with an echo through the old classroom. 

Still at his seat, Ben’s gaze slowly lifts back up to Rey’s face. 

“You really don’t have to stay…”

“I said I don’t mind.”

Rey drags a chair over from the next table and sits down across from Ben. He straightens up in his seat, no longer hunching over his test subject even as the frown on his face retains a distinctly morose edge. 

“You’re the best of our group,” he mutters, the bitterness in his voice directed only at himself. His gaze cuts pointedly towards the rose bush on Rey’s table, where two new pink roses have sprouted on their own. “You’re probably wondering why it’s so fucking hard for me.”

Rey shrugs off the self-deprecating weight to his words. “It’s like Elder Holdo said. Our powers come to us in different ways.”

Ben gives a humorless laugh, shaking his head a little bit. “She also said I need to ‘learn its language.’ What the hell is that even supposed to mean?”

Rey can’t help a slight chuckle. “Really? I have no clue.”

Ben meets her eyes. Across an extended moment, they share a mischievous smile. Rey starts noticing the little constellations of beauty marks across his face and _oh no,_ she thinks she’s blushing… Their gazes flee each other in tandem.

Ben clears his throat and looks back to his sad, single unmoving flower. He nods at it. “Show me how you did yours.”

Rey folds her arms on her side of the desk, considering for a moment. 

“I don’t think that will help. Like we were saying the other night – your power feels different for you than mine does for me. It works completely differently. Maybe… we can try to figure out what’s blocking you.”

Ben’s brow furrows. “Blocking me?”

Rey nods, mustering the courage to look at him again. “Something’s dividing you from your power. Like Holdo said – it’s right there beneath the surface, if you just let it through. What might be stopping you from letting it through?”

Ben gives a low, heavy sigh. He leans back in his chair, lifting his hands to push them through his hair. Rey’s chest constricts a bit when the dark mane of his hair tumbles back down around his face. What she would give to run her own hands through those waves of midnight…

Ben’s voice comes out utterly dispirited. “I don’t know. Everything.”

Rey arches an eyebrow. “Everything? We’re going to have to get a bit more specific, don’t you think?”

Ben’s shoulders lift and lower as he sighs again. Rey definitely doesn’t trace with her eyes just how wide they are as they move. 

“Don’t get me wrong – I like being here. I was so fucking relieved when I got the fire message that I was chosen, but… I didn’t realize how hard this would all be for me.” He waves a hand indistinctively above the desk. “I guess I had this idea that as soon as I started training with others of my kind, my power would just fall in line. Whatever it is that’s been _off_ inside me my whole life would finally work like it’s supposed to.” 

He goes silent, eyes glued absently to the flower bud. Rey can tell he’s not finished, so she waits. 

His voice is still softer when it resumes. “I know the Elders are supporting us and training us as best they can, but… I wish they could figure out what’s _wrong_ with me. It doesn’t seem like any of the other children struggle like I do. My powers have always been unwieldy, difficult to control. They make themselves known at only the wrong times. Trying to coax them out during these lessons has been… hell. Instead of things getting easier, I’m just thinking more and more that I’m a hopeless case. That I don’t belong here. Every day I just feel more alone.”

As Ben speaks, Rey wants nothing more in the world than to caress away the sadness from his face. When he finishes, she’s suddenly desperate with something like panic climbing up her throat.

“Ben, we all struggle in our own ways. We’re all trying to make sense of expectations and abilities that are brand new. You’re not alone - not nearly. The coven chose you for training because the Elders saw something extraordinary in you. We all do.”

Ben is silent for a long moment. He looks only at her and she looks back, trying to decipher the expression on his face that might border wistful. 

He finally speaks in a hushed tone, “You never struggle, Rey. You’re always so…” He bites his lip, seeming to wrangle for the right words. He finally says in a low voice near a whisper, “Formidable.”

The word combined with that _tone_ in his deep, deep voice sends a hot shudder through Rey. She tries not to show it, but Ben’s eyes follow something down her body, so fast she might have imagined it. 

Then, she recovers to absorb what he said. What it’s supposed to mean. And it’s utterly ridiculous.

“Ben, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing. I don’t know anything about our world - what our lives might be like if we make it through training and join the coven. Every day, I’m just stumbling through and I don’t have a fucking clue.”

“What are you talking about? You always know exactly what the Elders want. Your powers are… beautiful and potent and they’re happy to listen to you. You’re perfect for the coven.”

Rey’s mind circles deliriously around the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘perfect’ for a moment, before she gets a grip. She looks down, away from Ben’s molten gaze. She folds her hands on the desk, shrinking into herself a little bit.

“I never knew a single witch before I came here. My mom was one, but she renounced her coven and drew away from her power. This world was an impenetrable mystery to me. I was… _terrified_ every day. Terrified that no coven would want some girl raised in the human world without a clue. But I could never figure out how to live in the human world because I knew I didn’t belong there. I didn’t belong anywhere.

“I’ve always felt alone. I had no fucking idea how to act when I got here. All I know is that every day I hope and pray I don’t do something wrong - something that will get me kicked out of the one place where I don’t have to hide who I am.”

Rey slowly looks up, and the way Ben’s looking at her… It’s like his gaze is _vibrating_, he’s watching her so closely and intensely. She can see the disbelief in his expression - the words on his tongue that would try to tell her her fears are ridiculous. 

He doesn’t speak them. She’s glad. 

He simply absorbs and respects the honesty of her confession; then gives her his own. 

“I’ve always been afraid of my power.”

He leans in now. His voice is a feathery whisper, taking flight to circle around only the two of them. She finds herself leaning in too, drawn in, her hands resting closer to his on the tabletop. 

“Because of… what happened with your dad?”

The wince that passes over Ben’s features is fleeting, but unmistakable. A flash of terror that darkens his eyes. 

“Yes,” Ben whispers, his fingers sliding closer to Rey’s on the table. Rey has to lean in farther still, Ben’s voice is so faint. “I don’t want anyone else to know. I’m sure the Elders already do, but I don’t want you or anyone else to think I’m dangerous.”

“I would never think that. I can’t imagine…”

“It was three years ago. I was 16 and blowing off school. I was so tired of pretending to be human, sick of pretending that high school mattered at all. My parents are both witches and knew I was just waiting to join the shadow world permanently, but they kept telling me I needed to commit to school until I came of age. Dad started yelling one day, making threats about kicking me out if I didn’t stop cutting classes. I just… exploded. 

“I’d been repressing my powers at school to keep them hidden, repressing them at home because I was scared what would happen when I stopped… and in that one second, months worth of suppression unraveled all at once.” 

Rey watches the column of Ben’s throat as he swallows with difficulty. They’re so close now, leaned across their respective sides of the table, she can almost feel his breath brush her face. She’s just a little afraid of what will follow, but she can’t imagine moving away. 

“He got three broken bones and minor burns.”

Rey exhales slow, reeling. “Ben, it wasn’t your fault.”

“He said the same thing. So did Mom. But… it was. Of course it was. We all know it.”

“_No._” 

In her determination, Rey’s hand skips over the final inches of space to finally cover one of Ben’s - or the half of it her much-smaller hand can span across. 

“You never meant for that to happen. You would never want to hurt anyone, least of all your own father.”

Ben’s hand is trembling just the slightest bit beneath Rey’s. 

“I was so _angry_, Rey. It came out of nowhere. For the briefest second, I’m afraid that I did want to hurt him. Maybe it was my power just screaming to be used after being silenced for so long, and what if it tries again some day? If I can’t learn how to let it out properly – if I can’t channel it safely… What if I’m just a time bomb?”

Rey shakes her head firmly. “I won’t let you talk about yourself that way.” She takes his hand in hers with purpose. He watches with a slightly stunned expression as Rey brings his hand to cup the forgotten flower bud, her own shifting to cup the back of his hand in turn. 

“You’re not dangerous. You are powerful. _Formidable._ And you’re going to make this flower bloom.”

For the space of what seems an eternity, Ben’s gaze is riveted on her face. Rey looks up and meets it, soft heat crackling between them until Ben lets out a long breath, squaring his shoulders as he focuses on the flower bud. Focuses on his hand still clasped in Rey’s. 

Ben lifts his other hand and cups the single flower between them. Rey watches as his expression smooths into leveled focus. He’s staring at the flower with narrowed eyes, his hands tense beneath hers. Rey circles her fingers against the back of his hand. 

“Don’t try to overpower it,” she murmurs gently. “Let it overpower you.”

Ben blinks at that, but his attention endures. She feels his hands relax, watches them cup the flower more gently. Her fingers slide into the grooves along his knuckles.

Ben takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. 

They fly open again when Rey bursts out with the exclamation: “You’re doing it, Ben!”

Blooming white flowers are spilling out from Rey and Ben’s cupped hands, the flower stems weaving through and around their fingers as they grow. 

A disbelieving, joyous laugh flows from him. Rey looks up just in time to catch the sparkling grin brimming from his face. 

The flowers continue multiplying, weaving themselves in a garland that spills off the table and nearly reaches the floor before the growth slows and comes to a halt. A moment passes when both of them fall speechless, taking in the burst of life that just flowed from Ben’s hands. Not even Rey’s roses had grown so quickly. 

“See?” she says softly, her voice tentative as if keeping from breaking a spell. “Your magic is wonderful. It is good.”

Ben lets out a rush of breath. Before he can say anything, he attempts to move a hand from the nest of flowers and finds that it doesn’t budge. They both immediately realize Ben’s spell has inadvertently woven their hands together. 

Rey laughs a little as an attempt to lift her own hand causes both of Ben’s and the entire bundle of flowers to come with it.

“I take it back,” she jokes, smiling at him. “Getting your hands caught in flower garlands is clearly a very dangerous side effect.”

“Clearly,” Ben agrees, voice cracking slightly. 

“Hm,” Rey hums after a few seconds of attempted wiggling and shaking of their conjoined hands fail to free them. “Wait, let me try something. Hold still.”

Rey focuses on the flower stems on either side of their hands. She murmurs a severance incantation she learned a few days ago. The stems swiftly unweave from the center to free their hands. 

“Amazing,” Ben marvels. 

Rey shakes her head, fingering the garland still sprouting tiny buds. “_This_ is what’s amazing.” 

“I couldn’t have done it if you didn’t calm me down.”

“No. Ben, you did it on your own.”

When she meets his eyes, he doesn’t quite seem to be listening – some other purpose coming to the fore in his eyes. 

He leans in towards her again, his fingers a mere inch from hers on the table.

“You shouldn’t ever feel alone, Rey. I mean it. It doesn’t matter if you were raised entirely in the human world, or if we’re the first real witches you’ve ever met. You’re gifted. Extraordinary. And kind. You’re going to make this coven your own. You already are.”

His gaze flickers down, towards their hands resting so close together. He clears his throat, and Rey’s barely breathing. 

“And I… I just hope I’ll get to be part of it with you. I hope I’ll be somewhere near your side.”

Rey’s breathing stops for real. Her heart’s pounding and she has _no idea_ what’s going on but she knows she has to say something – something tender and clever and _fuck_, why does looking into Ben’s eyes have to make everything inside her fall to shambles like this…

The door to the classroom slams open. Ben and Rey both jump, their proximity dissipated.

“My, you two are early!” chirps Elder Holdo as she reenters the classroom for the afternoon lessons. She comes to a halt as she passes Ben’s desk, a smile spreading on her face. “Wonderful work, Ben. I knew you could do it.”

Ben looks at Rey and they share a secret smile. 

“Yeah. I guess I could.”

Rey moves one of her hands behind her back and keeps it there, hiding where one of Ben’s flower stems is still wrapped around her pinkie finger.

  


* * *

  


In the afternoon lesson, Rey lifts her hand in the air before her thought is even fully formed.

“Yes, Rey? A question about the exchange of consciousness spell?”

“Yes. Could you tell us some examples of when it’s acceptable to use the spell within the coven?”

“Within the coven?”

“Yes, Elder. I was curious whether it’s considered taboo to use the spell on another witch. Is that ever done?”

“Oh, certainly. It has practical purposes amongst us. If someone has a skill for a particular spell, healing perhaps, sometimes bodies will be switched so they can perform the spell for others. Sometimes it is used simply for enjoyment, such as in coupling rituals.”

Rey is very silent for a long moment, processing this. “People will… switch bodies for coupling?”

Holdo nods, unperturbed. “Yes, I can think of a few who practice it regularly – for the variation in experience and benefits to one’s power.”

Rey takes pains in phrasing her next question. “It’s not considered… improper? What if the people involved don’t all know someone had used the spell?”

Holdo just gives a slight shrug, seemingly unaffected by the question. “Unless someone involved is part of a life-mated pair, it’s unlikely for harm to come of it. Most coven members all already have intimate knowledge of each other already. We are a family. It is good to know each other in all ways.”

Rey sits back in her seat while Elder Holdo moves on to the next topic: Rituals of the Solstice. 

In the corner of her eye, Rey catches sight of Poe leaning forward and looking towards her with his eyebrows raised and a strange smile that certainly means no good. She sees him tilt his head in what seems to be Ben’s direction. Rey’s eyes automatically shoot towards him, where Ben still appears focused on the lecture. 

Unbidden, Rey’s mind starts connecting odd, accidental thoughts together. She doesn’t remember anything else from the lecture, lost to an idea that forms without her intention, but possesses her all the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand the weirdness commences! Pretty please have patience with me because I promise the Reylo heart of this is just getting stronger - just like Ben's magic :3 The next part will come very soon, but in the meantime I would love nothing more than people's thoughts/reactions!
> 
> My [tumblr](https://xoruffitup.tumblr.com/) is over here for less (more?) weirdness. :)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Ben makes a strangled noise, part relief and even more arousal. Around her cock, the heat of him is indescribable – so unspeakably tight and smooth and fluttering around her in a way that’s so fragile, Rey wants to fuck him until she’s claimed every bit of him for her own to cherish and protect and pleasure, again and again and always. _

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/181686886@N04/48939158727/in/dateposted/)

Rey thinks of nothing else for an entire week. One moment she’s alarmed that her own mind could come up with something so sordid – the next she’s even more alarmed how irrepressibly _tempted_ she is by it. But then her thoughts will circle back to what set it all off in the first place:

All of Ben’s massive form sprawled out on his back, naked and flushed. 

The way the sleek muscles along his chest and abdomen rippled with his pleasure.

The sounds Ben made as he was fucked.

Rey wants to do that to him. The more she thinks of it, the higher these flames of need dance within her. She wants him so _badly_ that every second spent near him and not touching him burns like the cruelest circle of hell. 

It all started months and months ago, when he flashed her his crinkled, lop-sided smile as they exchanged fumbling greetings. It escalated day by day, each time they walked together to class, shared smiles and private jokes, each time one of his wide hands brushed her skin in a friendly hug or _here let me help you up._ As the weeks passed, all of Rey’s waking desires had been for him, just the way a girl usually yearns for a boy. She imagined Ben sweeping her off her feet as he bent down to kiss her; imagined him peeling her clothes from her and his lush, pink lips pressing to her bare skin as he exposed more of her. Of course, she imagined him loving and solicitous as he took her the first time. 

And then she’d _seen_. Seen things her imagination would never have been able to supply. And now that it’s gotten in her head that she could try the spell – that she could be in the bedroom rather than watching from outside – she wants it all with a passion that won’t release her. 

In her own form, Ben is a solid foot taller than her. He’s nearly twice as broad. His hands could almost certainly span her waist. It’s a natural, wired instinct to yearn for him to dominate her. But the opposite – the opposite is so improbable, so tantalizing it turns her entire world inside out until her thoughts are consumed by it completely…

Ben being the one to quake and tremble beneath her.

Smoothing her hands down his thick thighs as she fills him.

Watching him pant beneath her; kissing gasps straight from his mouth as she has him. 

Of course, Rey knows with a pang that it wouldn’t really be _her_, in that bedroom. This is always where her thoughts veer into chaotic circles of indecision.

Ben wouldn’t gasp her name. She’d be sneaking into whatever Ben and Poe started. They don’t seem to be any kind of item, seeing as they never act any differently around each other and Poe keeps calling Ben “pal” and “bud” – the same as he always calls Rey. Thinking back to that night they left the door open, she never saw them kiss or even say each other’s names during the act. Though it had been apparent how much they’d both enjoyed it, Rey hopes it’s not just wishful thinking that has her convinced there’s nothing more than casual feelings between Poe and Ben.

She has reached the conclusion that Ben is probably gay. Sure, he spends a lot of time with her and they get along so very well, but she doesn’t know how else to explain the fact that he doesn’t seem as tortured as she is. 

_“You shouldn’t ever feel alone, Rey. I mean it. … You’re gifted. Extraordinary.”_

Sure, it’s clear that he likes her, but Rey is keenly aware that she’s likely the only one to feel the utterly electric draw when she’s close to him. He never shies away from her, no, and he’d let her briefly hold his hand when she helped him with the life-giving spell - but he seems to feel none of the same desperation that she does.

Rey has been so stupidly _obvious_ around him – always smiling at him and giggling at his weird sense of humor when they’re alone. She’s always taking every excuse to be close to him and he always just seems to get quiet and oddly pained-looking. 

It’s nonsensical – how badly she wants to feel beneath his clothes. How desperately she yearns to taste his sweet, trembling weakness when all six feet of him is broken down beneath her touch.

Even if it’s not _her_ hands doing it. If this is the only chance she’ll ever have…  


* * *

  
“Hey, Rey?”

She looks up at Poe from the books on potion-making spread over her lap, surreptitiously moving a hand to cover the title of the top-most book. 

“Yeah?”

“I know you like to keep the kitchen clean, but you don’t mind if I just leave this out here, do you?”

‘This’ seems to be his mug, which he’s currently waving in the air to demonstrate before he places it down on the counter, rather than back in the cabinets. 

Rey gives him an odd look. “No?”

Poe just beams at her. “Okay. Good. I’ll just leave it there.”

Without any further explanation, Poe goes off to his own room, humming to himself.

Rey just shakes her head as she goes back to the book, skimming down the list of ingredients for the exchange of consciousness spell. She’s been looking at it all week, going back and forth each time. 

Now, her eyes scan down all the way to the bottom of the page. She hasn’t yet read the details of actually performing the spell, not quite ready to think that far through the idea.

Her eyes catch on “The witch and the subject must each drink 20 drops of the completed potion from the same container. They must each consume the potion within two hours of each other for the spell to take effect. The recommended method is for the witch to drink from a cup belonging to the subject, then leave the subject’s portion mixed into their cup in an obvious location.”

Rey swears under her breath. 

“Damn Poe.”  


* * *

  
“Here.”

Rey looks up from the papers spread across the desk in front of her. It’s almost ten o’clock at night, and she’s been in the library for hours trying to finish an assignment.

Her gaze catches on Ben’s face, lingers, then finally makes its way down to what he’s holding out to her. 

A paper cup with a wisp of steam wafting from the little hole in the lid. He’s holding a second cup close to his chest. 

“Hot chocolate. I knew you’d probably be here working late.”

Almost in a daze, Rey moves slowly to take the cup, hold it between both her hands, and take a sip. The sweet warmth soothes her to the toes. 

She looks up at Ben with a grateful smile. “I thought we weren’t supposed to bring drinks in here. Old manuscripts and all that.”

He returns the smile and lifts a finger to his lips. “Our secret?”

She taps a finger to her own lips. “Our secret.”

She watches Ben’s back as he retreats back down the rows of bookshelves. 

That’s the moment when Rey decides. She has to go through with it.  


* * *

  
Rose groans. “Rey, we’re at a witches’ market for the first time in our lives and you’re seriously looking at _dried pigeon wings_?”

“I’m just stocking up on some potion ingredients, okay?”

Rose makes a face. “Sounds like some nasty potion.”

Rey ignores her as she pays the witch running the stand for the dried wings. 

“Come on, I want to go look at the enchanted jewelry over there!”

“One second, Rose. I just need to get some of these herbs. Oh, and a little bit of lamb’s blood…”

Rose makes a noise of horror.  


* * *

  
At their very first lesson on potions, Elder Kenobi had said in a long-suffering tone, “No, we do not use cauldrons. We haven’t for centuries. What you each have on the desks before you is what we call a Brewer. It uses modern technology to brew your potion faster and preserve its potency for longer.”

Now, staring at the buttons along the bottom of the square, silver contraption that looks like a crockpot from the future, Rey despairs she would have preferred a dilapidated medieval cauldron. 

She’s just spent well over an hour chopping and preparing all the ingredients. Her room smells horrific, and she just needs the Brewer to _turn on already_…

She presses a few more buttons randomly, and finally a light blinks on and the pot begins to heat with a soft rumbling sound. Rey can’t contain her noise of triumph. 

Using a long wooden spoon, she pokes at the ingredients inside as they begin to heat. Assuming she did everything right so far, the potion should be ready in twenty-four hours. Then she’ll have to perform an incantation over it, pour a bit into Poe’s mug, and then… maybe she’ll finally get to have Ben in the only way she can.  


* * *

  
The potion turns a bright blue color that makes Rey slightly concerned. The directions said it should clarify to a “sky blue,” but hers looks more neon. All the same, she’s waited the entire torturous 24 hours and at this point she can’t bear to doubt herself anymore.

She turns the page to read over the incantation. She and the other children have yet to reach any advanced level of rune reading, but Rey finds she can decipher most of them at a glance. Rey’s eyes skim across the lines a few times, trying to feel the symbols take shape on her tongue. She does her best _not_ to think about the notorious difficulty of the spell she’s about to attempt. 

Finally, she lays her hands along the edges of the Brewer containing the potion and closes her eyes. She focuses again on the incantation, parts her lips, and lets the strange, ancient words tumble forth. 

The spell seizes her like possession. The minute it takes her to speak the words distends into a plane without time or place. A faint edge of fear in the back of her mind makes Rey keep her eyes closed, as to avoid interrupting the exchange of energy she feels flowing between herself, the potion between her hands, and the air around her. The floor drops away from beneath her feet, her senses seeming to operate far outside herself as she hears her own voice sounding back to her from a great distance. 

She ends the incantation. Wary of the vast force she just tapped into, Rey keeps her eyes squeezed shut as she waits for the reverberations of her power filling the room to ebb away. Gradually, she returns to herself. When she’s finally able to focus on the feeling of the warm edges of the Brewer beneath her hands, she hesitantly peaks an eye open. 

The cacophony of magic she called forth has miraculously left her room untouched. Relieved that she hadn’t wrought hapless destruction, she leans over the pot to peer inside. 

Rey breathes low in wonder. The potion has transformed into a clear, sparkling, light blue. It looks like nothing less than the purest, deepest sky distilled into liquid form. 

Rey can’t help a soft murmur of wonder. She realizes only now that a large part of her didn’t think she would succeed. Yet she spends little more than a few moments surprised by her triumph, as her thoughts immediately tumble towards what her success means. 

_Ben._

Rey cracks her bedroom door open, shooting a furtive glance around the living room to check for the boys. After waiting long enough to be certain the quiet means she’s alone in the apartment, she darts over to the kitchen area to swipe Poe’s mug.

Back in her room, Rey scoops up a generous spoonful of the shimmering potion. She bites her lip as she meticulously measures out no more and no less than twenty drops. 

She lifts the mug and takes a deep breath. 

“Bottoms up,” she murmurs before throwing back the draught. 

It tastes like – honey and the sea and mint and sunlight all at once. The second it passes down her throat, she feels the allure of its magic. She finds herself thirsting for more, yearning to be drawn deeper into the magic’s pull – 

She shakes her head firmly. She will _not_ screw this up.

After ensuring no extra droplets linger in the cup, Rey again measures out exactly the correct portion. She carries Poe’s cup back to the kitchen, fills it the rest of the way with orange juice she grabs from the fridge, then leaves the cup exactly where it was. 

* * *

  


Rey has just found the spell for disposing of the rest of the potion when she hears the boys come in. 

“You’re crazy, man. There’s no way any spell would help you lift over five hundred,” Ben is saying with evident incredulity.

“Sure it would,” Poe asserts. “There are spells for flying, invisibility, regeneration – why not super strength?”

“All those spells augment the body’s existing physicality. But there’s simply no way for the human body to bear that much.”

“But we’re not just human, we’re…”

With her ear practically pressed to her bedroom door, Rey hears the moment Poe’s speech cuts off. 

“What is it?” she hears Ben ask. Poe’s feet must have paused along with his speech.

“Oh – nothing. I just forgot I left this juice out earlier. Nothing better than Vitamin C after a workout, right?”

“I guess, weirdo.”

Holding her breath, Rey hears dishes being set down and moved around the kitchen counter. She gasps when she feels a strange, phantom tug just behind her navel – like a string that was just yanked from the next room. She realizes Poe must have drunk his portion, and the spell must be unfurling to find its subjects.

The spell book said it would take effect about an hour after the subject drinks. So Rey should still have time…

“Cool if I take the shower first?” comes Ben’s voice again.

“Yeah, go ahead. But hey…”

Still hovering behind her door, Rey strains to hear when Poe’s voice drops just a little. 

“Afterwards, do you wanna…”

Ben’s voice slips down to a panicked whisper, “Shh! Rey will hear…”

“It’s fine, don’t flip out. We’re all open-minded here.”

“You know that’s not the problem when it comes to her.”

“I know that _plenty_ well, Ben. So you wanna, later?”

“Shh! Yeah, yeah, fine.”

“Your room?”

“Yeah, sure. Now shut up – I’m getting in the shower.”

“I’ll be thinking about your body in the shower.”

“God, Poe, _shut up_!”

“Alright, alright, shutting up.”

Rey hears heavy footsteps towards the bathroom, then the sound of the door closing. More footsteps – must be Poe’s – and then Rey nearly jumps out of her skin when a single swift rap sounds at her door.

She stands frozen, wondering if Poe actually expects her to answer. But a moment later, she hears him whistling to himself as he returns to his own room and closes the door. 

So that was that – a quick signal that he knows exactly what she’s up to. And he seems to have put everything in place for her. Why he’s being so amenable to Rey joyriding in his body for a little while, she’s not quite sure, but it does help ease her conscience a bit.

A little while later, Rey hears Ben leaving the bathroom and then Poe going in. She estimates the spell could kick into effect within the next ten minutes, so Rey hurriedly makes her preparations. 

She casts the spell to safely empty the brewing pot. Then she lays out on her bed, closes her eyes, and whispers the incantation three times for deepest sleep. Poe might think he’s getting cheated in this exchange, but Rey doesn’t want anyone messing around in her body. Her own body will stay fast asleep during the period of the switch. 

* * *

  


The next thing she knows, Rey is staring into the bathroom mirror at a face that isn’t her own. Realizing what’s just happened, Rey lets out a gasp and watches as Poe’s hands hurriedly cover his mouth. 

_Her mouth._ God, this is going to be _so weird_…

Poe seemed to have been midway through drying himself off, as Rey quickly realizes she’s naked and a towel is pooled around her feet. But looking down means the first thing she notices is…

Oh. Yep. Okay, she’s a man now. She bites her lip – her strangely _stubbly_ lip – as she remembers with a rush of panic that her plan involved actually _using_ this temporarily borrowed manhood. 

Before beginning her training for the coven, Rey had only seen one other dick in her entire life: That of the one and only boyfriend she ever slept with. He was a relatively unremarkable human boy, and his dick – along with the whole experience – had been relatively unremarkable as well.

Seeing Poe’s hanging there, casual and almost innocent looking, is just about the strangest thing she’s ever seen. It’s not really attractive or unattractive, per se, it’s just… there. 

Shit, Rey hopes she can figure out how to work the thing…

Rey takes a deep breath, holds it, and wraps one of her freakishly big man hands around the base. A moment of panic consumes her because _‘oh god she’s never touched a limp one it feels so weird what is she doing.’_ But after she moves Poe’s hand in one, two, then three loose pumps up and down, she already feels it hardening against her palm. With a few slightly more confident pumps, she watches with a mix of fascination and horror as it starts to lift a bit. Then, past the unutterable _weirdness_ of this whole thing, she feels an unmistakable curl of warmth unfolding behind her groin, tingling as it spreads slowly up into her chest. 

Rey bites her lip again hard to contain a sound of surprise. Arousal in her own body never felt anything like this. 

She jumps when a soft knock sounds on the bathroom door, and she drops Poe’s half-hard dick like it’s on fire.

Ben’s voice sounds just above a whisper, “Are you coming? You’re taking forever.”

Momentarily panicking, Rey clears her throat. Forgetting she literally _is_ Poe, she goes to pitch her voice low in her best approximation of a man’s voice, “I’ll be right there. Uh… man.” It comes out sounding like Poe has a bad chest cold. 

“Are you okay?” 

“Yeah. Of course I am. Starship cruising smooth and all that. You know.”

She hears Ben snort from the other side of the door. “You are such a loser. Why I let you fuck me is anyone’s guess.”

Rey has to clutch the edge of the sink to steady herself. She can do this. She mastered a spell years beyond her experience level. She can handle talking about _this_ with the subject of all her fantasies and affections in one. She has to – if she’s about to try _doing this with him. _

She clears her throat as silently as she can, then adds a bit of rasp when she makes herself say, “Nothing to guess at, Ben. It’s because I fuck you so good and you know it.”

“Don’t get so full of yourself - you’re decent,” Ben rejoins with what Rey finds surprising nonchalance. “Now hurry up before I start without you.”

Rey leans against the sink, stares at Poe’s face, and takes a deep breath. She already knows the hardest part of this will be remembering who she’s supposed to be. Remembering to _be a guy_ – a guy who’s apparently just fucking his roommate for fun. 

She can’t get weird. She can’t get emotional. She can’t get clingy. All three are instincts that bubble up whenever she’s near Ben; and she’s about to be a whole lot nearer to Ben than she’s ever been. She has to remember not to kiss him – he and Poe don’t seem to have that vibe. She has to remember to keep a level head. Even though she’s having a hard time just continuing to breathe, when she thinks of what she’s about to do. 

With Ben. _To Ben._

Rey takes a deep, fortifying breath. She looks up in the mirror and gives Poe’s face a stern, self-assuring look. 

“Get it together, girl. You’ve got this,” Poe’s reflection tells himself.

With that, she picks up the towel, wraps it around her – Poe’s – waist, and opens the bathroom door. 

She takes the few steps to Ben’s bedroom door with strides exuding as much manly confidence as she can. Ben’s door is cracked open. With Poe’s hands, she pushes it open wider and closes it quickly behind her. She takes another quick, deep breath, before turning her attention to the bed. 

Her knees nearly give out, as all her stern pep talk flutters away to abandon her in an instant.

Ben is laying back on his bed, spread out entirely naked with his eyes closed. There’s a tube of lube on the bed next to him and he’s touching himself with one hand – slow, aimless slides with a loose fist. 

Rey’s eyes shoot back and forth in a frenzy, unable to decide where to look between his relaxed, languid expression, the miles and miles of skin on display, or the really very shocking size of his dick. Rey didn’t get a proper look at it before, and now she suddenly can’t look anywhere else. Ben isn’t entirely hard yet, but just watching how far his hand has to move – his wide, _giant_ hand – to complete a slow stroke all the way up to the head and then back down the shaft…

Instead of a tingle of heat, this time it’s a veritable punch to the gut. Rey suddenly knows she’s going to be able to work Poe’s dick just _fine._

Ben cracks his eyes open. “Finally, you diva.” 

He lifts himself to his elbows and slides up a bit on the bed to make room for Poe – or, Rey. Ben nods towards the lube. 

“I prepped a bit already but I wanted you to use your mouth again.” 

Rey squeezes her hands together behind her back. WhatwouldPoesaywhatwouldPoesay?

“Demanding, aren’t we?”

“You didn’t seem to complain last time.”

_Go for it. You have to go to the bed now. Move it, Rey. _

Rey drops the towel from Poe’s waist. She saunters to the bed, trying desperately to appear at ease with the hard-on jutting out from her hips. Ben is blessedly distracted, sliding a pillow under his lower back and then spreading his legs, knees bent and feet planted. Rey’s place is clear. 

Standing at the foot of the bed before she gets on it, Rey has a flash of a moment she’d call transcendent, if she weren’t already experiencing it in someone else’s body. Because Ben is _right there_ – Ben is naked and relaxed, ready and waiting for her. Ben has his legs spread in offering while the rest of his massive frame is sprawled out for the taking. 

Before she saw him with Poe, she could never have thought to want him this way. But now she’s standing here, only feet away from him laid out there in languid submission, and Rey suddenly finds the hunger seizing her to be entirely natural and wholly her own.

Her anxiety tunes out. Her own desire and the fire stoking higher in Poe’s belly are impossible to distinguish anymore. 

Rey kneels on the bed, crawling up to settle between Ben’s legs. She doesn’t know what to touch first, because she wants to touch _everywhere. _

“I’m almost ready,” Ben says from above her, shifting his hips slightly so more of him is exposed to her. “Just a little to loosen me up.”

_Anything, Ben_ is what Rey wants to say. Instead, she makes Poe’s voice say, “Alright, Princess.”

Ben snorts at the name – a sound that shifts to a sigh when Rey slides her hands up his thighs to ease them a little farther apart. She’s glad for the size and strength in Poe’s hands, when she’s able to cup them around most of Ben’s ass. 

He smells like fresh body wash and just a little bit of musk that can’t be categorized as anything other than _Ben_, and Rey’s already nearly lightheaded when they haven’t even done anything yet.

_I can do this. I’m going to do this._

Rey looks up Ben’s body from where she’s lying between his open legs. She looks past the towering underside of his cock, now growing flushed and halfway erect. She looks along the planes of his abs and chest, the rosy little buds of his nipples, and then all the way to his face. His eyes are closed again, waiting for the press of a mouth to where he’s most sensitive. But the pillows under his head make it so Rey can see his face perfectly. She can just make out his eyelashes against his cheeks and the way his bottom lip is sucked between his teeth, and she wants to give him everything in the world. 

Including this. 

Rey spreads Ben open with Poe’s hands, slides closer, and tilts her head down. Whatever reservations she may have had are distant, seeing as it’s really Poe’s mouth about to do the work. 

In comparison to the rest of him, Ben’s hole is a tiny, shockingly delicate thing. Rey can tell he’s worked it a bit already, as it doesn’t seem to be puckered quite as tightly closed as it would normally be. It gleams with lingering slick from the lube he’d already used to open himself a bit. Hot anticipation coiling in her belly, Rey licks a slow, broad stripe across it. 

It _quivers_ under the touch, and Ben emits a rumbling whimper. From one second to the next, Rey is thrown nearly breathless with the force of arousal rushing through her. She spreads Ben open wider, and starts mouthing across him in earnest. 

Ben is… delectably sensitive. Rey can’t decide what she enjoys more: The wet laps across him that make him go boneless as he moans deep, or sealing her lips to him and sucking until he bucks and gasps beneath her. Thinking back to Poe’s example, Rey extends her tongue and prods at the opening. Ben hisses between his teeth as Rey’s tongue presses in past the tight ring of muscle. Once her tongue is inside, she sucks again around it, and that sets Ben off in a string of deep, guttural curses. 

Craving to hear every desperate, pleasured sound waiting inside him, Rey continues circling her tongue inside to ease him open as she trails a hand upward. She cups his balls, then traces fingers along the underside of his cock as she licks deeper inside him. 

Ben groans loud and sharp, and she can tell from the growing tension in his body that he’s making effort not to thrust up into her hand. 

Ready to speed things on, Rey leaves a wet, open-mouthed kiss over his hole before replacing her tongue with two fingers. Watching him take two fingers up to the knuckle, she thinks with a flush that she got to kiss him after all. 

Ben moans, deep and needy. “I’m ready,” he says, near a whine.

“You’re ready when your pretty hole takes three fingers,” Rey rumbles to him without missing a beat.

“Fuck,” Ben breathes as Rey scissors two fingers deep inside him. Finally, she’s able to work a third finger in past his entrance. By this point, Ben’s breathing has gone shallow and desperate. He’s practically vibrating around her fingers, and it sets every bit of heat and passion in Rey’s body surging straight to her cock when she realizes just how badly Ben needs to be fucked. 

Rey has wanted him for weeks, for _months_, and she feels herself just at the edge of all of it as the dick she’s borrowing throbs and demands to be inside of him already.

Ben makes a broken sound when Rey’s three fingers slide out from him completely. Rey lets out a gravelly curse in Poe’s voice as she watches his empty hole clench in a desperate search for something to fill it. 

Distantly, Rey remembers how Poe talked to Ben when she watched them together, and she lets herself go. 

“Your tight little hole is so thirsty, hmm, Ben? It’s just desperate for something to stretch it wide. So greedy for a good fucking.”

Ben makes a noise like he’s in pain, writhing beneath her. The sight sends Rey entirely beyond herself.

“Lucky for you, my cock’s feeling just as greedy.”

Rey pushes up to her knees. Ben scrambles to spread himself into position, legs bent up and back towards his chest. Rey hooks her arms beneath his knees, pressing herself in tight between his legs until the leaking head of her cock rubs across his entrance. 

Ben makes a sound near a whimper, and Rey looks up just in time to see a shudder roll through him. 

Rey has to fight the urge to freeze in awe at the sight of him – sprawled out and spread open right there beneath her. From where she’s kneeling between his thighs, right where he’s hot and vulnerable and so, so sensitive, she is nearly overwhelmed by the sight of flushed skin, tight muscles, and broad, quivering shoulders. Ben’s eyes are closed in anticipation, his lower lip bright pink where it’s lodged between his teeth. She notices his hips moving ever so slightly against the pillow under him in an aimless search for friction, and Rey nearly can’t breathe. 

He is so _big_ beneath her, with such strength in the curves of his arms and the planes of his chest, and yet he’s utterly, willingly dismantled. Bare and spread wide open, he is supple and unspeakably beautiful, every quiver of his body giving off need so palpable that he cannot be denied.

Poe’s dick seems _almost_ as desperate for Ben as Rey is, given the amount of slick already leaking from it. In a blessed moment of lucidity when Rey remembers how good she wants to make this for Ben, she reaches down to work the wetness along the length of her throbbing cock. More just keeps streaming from the head, making a mess all around Ben’s hole until he’s wet and yearning. He’s making breathless, nonsensical pleading noises, his hips grinding down as his hole keeps clenching against the head of the cock that’s not _quite_ inside him yet.

Rey is nearly panting herself, dizzy with the intensity of need she’s never felt an equal to. Her hands are shaking when she reaches for the lube and quickly spreads some along the cock straining to get inside of Ben, just so she’s sure she won’t hurt him. Her hands still trembling the slightest bit, she wraps one hand around the base of her dick and holds Ben’s hip still with the other. She guides herself closer, closer, until the dark-flushed head of her cock sinks into Ben. 

He makes a strangled noise, part relief and even more arousal. Around her cock, the heat of him is _indescribable_ – so unspeakably tight and smooth and fluttering around her in a way that’s so fragile, she wants to fuck him until she’s claimed every bit of him for her own to cherish and protect and pleasure, again and again and always. 

And the desperate noises he makes, the way his inner muscles clench like they’re trying to hold her there forever – they make it very clear that his body simply wants to be ravished and filled and _owned_, no matter what comes after. 

Even eager as Ben clearly is, the tight ring of muscle around Ben’s entrance isn’t quite as pliant as the rest of him. Able to think of nothing but having more - _all_ of his tight heat engulfing her, Rey grits her teeth, holds his hips tight, and rocks into him with tiny, shallow thrusts.

Ben makes a soft noise each time Rey’s cock lodges a little deeper inside him. It’s work – making Ben’s body loosen little by little to make room inside. But _oh_ \- is it worthwhile. Rey shudders and grits out a curse nearly each time she sinks another half inch inside Ben. His body is _searing_ inside, muscles fluttering in helpless indecision between drawing her deeper and pushing her out. Judging by the sounds he’s making, deeper has to be the only thing _he_ wants.

Rey’s only halfway inside him and already panting, awash in sensations her own brain was never meant to be able to process. Having a cock attached to her – having that cock halfway deep inside Ben’s quivering, squeezing hole – it’s nearly more than her ability to comprehend. The pleasure is sharp and aggressive; edged like nothing her own body has ever felt. Every single millimeter of Poe’s dick is sending shockwaves from where it presses deeper through Ben’s inner muscles. 

From somewhere in her belly suddenly unfurls a foreign and yet utterly consuming need to plunge all the way inside – to feel this same mind-searing bliss over every single inch of her cock; to lose her mind and her very self in it completely and surrender to the tidal wave that would pull her all the way out to sea.

For a fleeting moment, she understands why men are so desperate for this.

Her hips give a decisive drive forward with a font of alarming, masculine strength. Ben’s whole body rocks, and she feels every inch of him go tense beneath her as he lets out a strangled, gasping sound. 

_Does it feel good for you, sweetheart? Was I too rough? _She wants to ask; she wants to reach up and smooth his hair back from his face as she watches him pant. _I’ll take care of you, I promise. _

“You okay?” Poe’s voice asks instead.

After a long moment during which Rey wages a fierce internal battle to stop herself from stroking her hands along Ben’s thighs and sides to soothe him – he finally seems to adjust and gives a shaky nod. 

“Yeah. Fine. Move already.”

Rey looks down, to where Poe’s cock has now fully disappeared inside Ben’s body, and she has to bite her lip to keep in the kind of adoring sounds Poe probably wouldn’t make. Filled as far as Rey could reach, Ben is stretched so wide open it makes Rey dizzy to look at. It’s the most obscene, stunning, arousing thing she’s ever seen. She has no idea how she’ll ever look away.

The part of Rey’s brain supposed to control speech takes a few seconds to summon Poe’s voice, “Alright, babe. Whatever you say.”

With Poe’s hands, she has to grip Ben’s hips more tightly than she’d like when she tries to slide out slightly. Ben has her locked in so tightly and so _deep_ and her dick sure doesn’t want to go anywhere – but with a grunt she manages to unlock herself just enough to slide halfway out. 

A deep groan spills from her when she feels the friction – feels how Ben quivers and twitches around her; how _strong_ he feels as he engulfs her, his body giving only just enough for thrusts that are forceful enough to claim this secret, illicit space deep inside him. 

Rey swears she’s drowning in him. Poe’s hips start snapping forward as if on wired instinct, while Rey tries to keep her head above the surging waves of sensation searing through her from where she’s submerged deep inside Ben’s body.

It feels like the entire world. Like her senses are blown out and open as she builds up a rhythm and the tight, hot grip of Ben’s body overpowers everything else she’s ever known. 

Then, she makes herself open her eyes. And she sees Ben, flushed and gasping and equally devastated. His chest is heaving, his eyes squeezed shut as he breathes fast and hard between lips open wide and bright pink from working his teeth against them. On either side of her, his thighs are trembling as her cock plunges into him again and again.

She remembers what Poe said, when she saw them together: “So deep for fucking.”

Now Rey knows _exactly_ what he meant. 

Even as he quakes and whines each time Rey drives into him all the way, there can’t be anything more magnificent in the world than the feel of Ben’s body so blindingly tight and blisteringly hot around her; his helpless noises in his deep, velvet voice; the sight when he writhes under a particularly hard thrust and tips his head back, his wide chest heaving and glistening with sweat. 

There’s so _much_ of him to fuck. His body swallows each thrust like it’s starving, craving the next onslaught. Every single slide into his supple, huge body – so firm outside and yet so soft and tight inside – sends Rey near out of her mind.

“You take me so well. So good,” Rey rasps, barely getting Poe’s voice to work.

In her head, the praises won’t stop: _You’re so beautiful you feel exquisite you are beyond anything I could have-_

She’s starting to wonder whether she should start touching Ben’s cock now, or if it’s too early. It’s probably never too early to start touching a guy’s -

Ben’s murmur cuts off her thoughts: “Talk to me like you did last time.”

Past the noisy sound of Poe panting from Rey’s mouth, it takes her a second to catch up to his words. She doesn’t know what he means, but she’s sinking all the way into him again and the way he _squeezes_ around her sends everything else from her mind -

“About Rey.”

The rhythm of Poe’s hips stutters, then falters completely. Rey is aware of her heart pounding, and suddenly it’s more than just pleasure burning her inside – it’s a burst of panic as well.

Through it all, Rey focuses every functioning thought towards keeping Poe’s voice even and unaffected: “What do you want to hear?”

Ben gasps, his shoulders arching against the bed as Rey gives a particularly deep thrust that hits a live wire inside him. 

He works his hips down into her next push as Rey sinks inside again, leaning in to hear all his noises and his answer to…

“If I were in your place. If it were Rey under me, right now.”

Rey forgets how to breathe. Or how to think. 

There’s no way – simply no way that _this_ is what Ben wants to hear. When he’s never given a sign that he felt anywhere near as desperate as she has every single day since she met him. He’s never given any indication – never reciprocated all the times she purposefully stood in his space or brushed her arm against his or smiled up at him like a besotted idiot…

Was she an idiot to misread signs? Is it even possible that Rey could get something so very wrong? Even something she wanted so very, _very_ badly?

A soft noise of discomfort comes from Ben, making Rey realize with a jolt that she has frozen – stuffing him full without any movement or relief.

She hurriedly returns to a hard rhythm, drawing on all the strength Poe’s body has to offer to keep driving in through the last of Ben’s inner muscles offering resistance.

There’s no space to think things through to any conclusion now. She has to play this role and make him feel so good that he’d never think to suspect anything strange.

That, and she just wants to make him feel better than he ever has before. It doesn’t matter how – it doesn’t matter _why_ this makes him feel so good…

She whispers in Poe’s deepest, roughest murmur, “If Rey were here? If she was the one spread out on her back right now, instead of you?”

Ben bites his lip even as he keeps panting, loudly and barely within control. He squeezes his eyes shut and nods. 

“She’d be moaning even louder than you are. She would yell your name. Then as she gets close, she’d whisper it so you can only just barely hear.”

Ben’s gone quiet now – wide chest lifting and lowering at a steady pace as his eyes remain shut, his entire body strained between processing the spoken words and the cock still stretching him farther open with each push. 

“She’d be… wet,” Rey manages in little more than a whisper. “You’d push inside of her, and she’d drip out around your cock.”

Ben makes a noise near a whimper, and Rey feels him fluttering around every inch of her, clinging to her still more deeply. 

Rey takes a deep breath, the edge suddenly rushing up fast and hard. She can feel it building up deep in Poe’s belly – explosive and devastating like nothing she’s ever felt before.

She scrambles to wrap a hand around the base of Ben’s cock, thinking it must be time now and the choked groan Ben produces seems to confirm. She slides her fist all the way up and all the way down, in tandem with her hips as she feeds his hole inch by inch all over again, then withdraws from his clinging, trembling muscles only to fuck through them again.

“She would want you so bad, Ben. Want you to fill her up with every last bit of this beautiful cock.”

She hopes it’s not weird to use that word, but there’s really no other appropriate description. It’s almost just as good as the tight, quivering heat of his hole – the sight of his thick, dark flushed cock curving up against his stomach. It’s nothing short of mesmerizing, watching Poe’s fist slide all the way along it. Rey’s mouth abruptly goes dry when she even considers the idea of all that being inside her…

“You would fuck her so well, wouldn’t you, Ben? Sure, you’d be gentle, but she’d feel you so deep, you’d be her entire world.”

A manic sound dislodges from Ben’s chest, and suddenly his hips are trembling beyond control. Rey’s fist slides up him quickly, pumps the top half just a few more times, and then he’s falling to pieces beneath her. His release spurts out to coat her hand, and inside it’s like all of him goes completely slack. Poe’s voice is moaning beyond Rey’s control or awareness as she fucks into him those final times. Ben simply lays there, wide open and shaking, his entire body pliable and boneless and so, _so_ ripe. 

Rey grips his thighs to submerge herself inside him as deep as she can possibly go. Ben whimpers with the final pulse of his own release, and as these deep, secret parts of him melt open to her completely, Rey feels the sudden rush of orgasm begin to tear through her – up from where her cock’s lodged as deep inside Ben as it can possibly go. 

At the last possible second, she remembers Poe pulling out. Just in time, she pulls free of Ben’s hole even as it stubbornly clings to her, and Poe’s cum splatters out all across Ben’s hips and cock. Rey bites her lip as hard as she can to avoid saying Ben’s name over and over again as she comes. He emits a soft whine beneath her that only stops when Rey’s cock finally finishes covering him in its spend. 

Rey just barely manages to twist to the side enough to land next to Ben on the bed. It takes a long time for either of them to catch their breath enough to speak. 

It’s Ben who finally manages, “Alright, I admit. You were damn good that time.”

Rey has nothing to say. She’s reeling from the cataclysmic orgasm that’s still receding little by little. Her head is still spinning at the things she just said to him. The things he _wanted_ her to say… 

Ben starts speaking again in a soft, breathless voice and _god,_ Rey just wants to curl into the sound of it and the heat of him beside her…

But suddenly the walls of Ben’s bedroom go hazy and indistinct. Her mind seems to unlatch from the present moment little by little in a way she can’t control. She tries to fight it with whatever strength she has left, because Ben is so very close and relaxed and massive just here beside her, and if she rolled into him just a little he might swallow her up in his arms just the way she’s yearned for this whole time -

Rey opens her eyes. She’s in her own bedroom, lying out on her own bed. Her arms are still crossed over her chest, and she’s still dressed in the same clothes as when she performed the spell. 

She lies still for a long time – both her mind and body processing everything that it just indirectly experienced in a form that wasn’t her own. At the same time, her ears are searching for the sound of commotion from Ben’s room, fearing that Poe’s abrupt return to his own body might be cause for alarm. But a minute later, Rey just hears a smattering of Ben and Poe’s laughter through the walls. 

She breathes out in relief. Then she curls on her side, pulls the blankets up, and breathes out again in every complicated thing but relief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> .....you all still with me? One more part for all to be revealed, confessions to be made, and you bet some more smut to take place. What are you all thinking/feeling at this point?!
> 
> So this is my main current WIP: Modern politics/Washington DC Reylo [Love It If We Made It](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19841884/chapters/46984972)  
And my [tumblr!](https://xoruffitup.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Hope to see you all back very soon for the last part!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Is it maybe… something I can help with? I’m here for you, Rey. If you want.”
> 
> Suddenly Rey can barely breathe. She’s near in pain, with how badly she simply wants to close the space between them – to slide her arms around his solid frame and lean in to his warmth. She aches with how badly she yearns to hear his soft voice against her forehead, or pressed into her hair…
> 
> And she can’t. She doesn’t deserve it. She lied and she was selfish and surely once he discovers, he’ll never again look at her with that shining gentleness filling his eyes right now. The look that’s nearly about to break her heart. 
> 
> “I – I do want, Ben,” is all Rey manages to whisper.

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/181686886@N04/48939158727/in/dateposted/)

Rey is – really terribly weird about it, when she first sees him the next day. Ben appears behind her as she’s walking to their lesson, just catching the door to the classroom before it falls shut behind her.

“Hi, Rey.”

Rey turns, and she knows she’s gaping and her mouth is opening and closing without forming words but she can’t seem to do anything about it. 

She’s seen all of him. She’s seen him whimper and moan and fall to pieces. She’s been _inside him._ She’s seen him arch and his body seize up at the idea of being in bed with _her_ and nothing can ever be the same…

“Hey, are you okay?” he asks, his tone and expression taking on an air of concern.

Rey swallows, nods. 

“Fine, Ben. I-I’m fine.”

She manages a weak smile for him before she turns to find a seat. 

Nothing can be the same, and she has no idea how to tell him. No idea to tell him just how much she knows and how she knows it; how to tell him without ruining every single thing. 

Rey hears none of today’s lecture, hating herself just a little bit.  


* * *

  
“Rey, can we talk for a second?”

Rey’s breath catches when Ben’s voice sounds from the door of his bedroom, just before she manages the escape to her own room. She closes her eyes, taking a long second before she turns to face him. 

She’s been avoiding him for these past few days. She can’t deny it, but even less can she hope to explain it. 

Ben clears his throat. His height completely filling the doorframe, he lifts a hand to rub the back of his neck. 

“I just wanted to ask whether we’re okay. We – um, haven’t talked much lately and I don’t know if there’s something bothering you, or if you’re mad at me for something…”

“Oh no, Ben. Of course not.” Rey’s heart is seizing in her chest at the idea of Ben thinking he’s the one who did something wrong. “I’ve just been… sorting through a lot.”

Ben leans down ever so slightly where he’s standing. His head tilts towards her, as if he’s trying to hear what’s unspoken behind Rey’s vague answer. 

Ben shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans. His shoulders rounded as if trying to make himself smaller, he takes a few small steps towards Rey. 

“Is it maybe… something I can help with? You don’t have to tell me, if you’re not comfortable. But… I’m here for you, Rey. If you want.”

Suddenly Rey can barely breathe. She’s near in pain, with how badly she simply wants to close the space between them – to slide her arms around his solid frame and lean in to his warmth. She aches with how badly she yearns to hear his soft voice against her forehead, or pressed into her hair…

And she can’t. She doesn’t deserve it. She lied and she was selfish and surely once he discovers, he’ll never again look at her with that shining gentleness filling his eyes right now. The look that’s nearly about to break her heart. 

“I – I do want, Ben,” is all Rey manages to whisper.

Ben’s quiet for a long moment. Studying her, expression inscrutable but still tender.

“What do you want?”

_You you you. Always you. Any way you. _

“I’ve wanted something for a long time. Every day, for months since I got here. But I… I made a rash decision. I thought I could never get what I wanted. I thought it was impossible. So I did something to try to get close. The closest thing. But now… I’ve realized that by doing that, I messed up the only chance I might have had in the first place. I-I might have ruined everything…”

Her voice falters, and Ben immediately takes a step closer, his expression distressed. 

“What are you talking about, Rey?”

“_You_,” Rey whispers. She bites her lip, heart pounding as her hands bunch in the long sleeves of her sweater. She watches Ben freeze where he stands, eyes going very wide. The rest of him seems suspended, almost afraid to react.

“Me?” he whispers back. 

“It was me, Ben.”

“What was you? I don’t understand…”

Rey plants her feet, hitches her shoulders, and takes the jump. She’s not expecting any parachute to open – she can only hope that the fall will be clean. 

“The other night, when you and Poe…”

She trails off when that’s enough to make a stricken expression erupt on Ben’s face. Rey presses on – makes herself say it even as the words already burn her throat. 

“It was me. I did the exchange of consciousness spell. Poe and I… we exchanged.”

At first, Ben’s expression doesn’t react. He stays completely still for a very long time. Rey watches for the inevitable reaction, understandably delayed because it’s so unthinkable – what she did. So inexcusable. She has no _clue_ what she was thinking… She cares about Ben so much and yet all she thought about was herself, as if Ben’s knowledge and consent counted for nothing. 

Rey’s afraid she might be sick. And even though she knows she deserves Ben’s inevitable scorn, she should really get out before she…

“You managed the spell?” Ben’s expression still hasn’t changed, but he’s looking at Rey with single-minded focus more intense than anything Rey’s ever seen. “You carried out one of the most difficult spells in all of witchcraft. So you could… with me?”

Rey tries to swallow and realizes she can’t. She wishes Ben would just yell – wishes he would slam his door shut and cut her out permanently. Just rip the bandage away so she can see just how wounded this is all going to leave her – all of her own doing. 

“You wanted me?”

He doesn’t sound anything near angry. He sounds… incredulous. His voice has gone soft and questioning, and all six feet of him still stands frozen. 

This is nothing, absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about, next to what she’s done. And Rey knows it doesn’t matter anymore, because whatever attraction he might have shared is surely turning to hate even now as they stand here. 

“Yes, Ben,” Rey manages, voice strangled as she fights off the tears finally struggling to make their belated entrance. “I… I wanted you this whole time. Every day since we met. But I realized you were with Poe and you’d probably never feel what I felt, but I just wanted to touch you so badly it was starting to hurt and – “

Rey cuts off when Ben lurches forward, his long strides crossing the space between them in a mere second. In the same fluid motion, his hands come up to cradle Rey’s face between them and without missing a single beat, he bows like a willow branch to kiss her. 

The questions that should explode in Rey’s head are snuffed out instantly. There is only the press of his soft lips – softer than anything she’s ever felt. There is only the gentle cradle his wide hands make around her jaw as he tilts her head up slightly. Just enough so his lips can slide all the way against hers. When she melts towards him, his hands are there, holding her right where she should be as one kiss slips into the next in a way that’s effortless and so _right._

All of Rey’s panic and self-loathing drop away. Her world shrinks to Ben’s mouth stroking over hers and it’s a place beyond dreams.

Beyond all witchcraft.

So slowly that everything seems to be moving at half-speed, Ben’s lips untangle from hers. He pulls back only just enough so his eyes can find hers – his hands still warm against either side of her face as he gazes down at her with molten sweetness in his dark eyes. His voice comes as a cracked, gentle rumble. 

“Rey… I thought you’d never. Why would you like me? I… I can barely even access my power and you’re one of the most incredible witches I’ve ever met. You could have anyone.”

Rey’s not even touching him, and the fact seems incredible. His hands – so broad and capable as the pads of his thumbs ghost along her cheeks – feel as if they’re _everywhere_, enveloping her completely and she’s losing herself in him entirely…

“But you’re the only one,” she admits, just above a whisper. “The only one I’ve felt this hopeless for in my whole life. You’re warm and calming, and being with you is what made me feel like I have a place here – in this brand new world I barely know. Everything fits so perfectly, whenever I’m with you.”

“Meeting you was the only thing that felt easy in the midst of all this,” Ben murmurs in reply, his eyes darting back and forth and all across her face as if trying to memorize what it’s like to see her in such proximity. Rey can feel the soft caress of his breath against her lips and her strength threatens to fail her completely. He’s still stroking her face as he goes on, “Ever since my power awoke, I feel like I’ve been at constant war with myself. But when you’re near… it all goes quiet. There’s finally peace. But – I was sure I was the only one. You’re powerful and what could you ever want with me to drag you down?”

One of Rey’s hands darts up to circle Ben’s wrist. “You know, you terrified me on the day we met.”

Ben blinks, looking endearingly as if he’s wracking his memory for whatever he did. “I did?”

“Yes. Ben – you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life and I was scared. So scared that every boy I met here would make me feel like you did that first day. Like I’m floating in zero gravity. Like I can do anything in the world, and yet no magic could ever compare to your eyes or your voice or how everything inside me sings when you’re close – “

Rey’s helpless to do anything but lurch up into his lips again. She releases his wrist to grip his shoulders instead. He releases a soft noise against her lips before his own part. His hands slide down her back, then draw her close at the waist. Rey fits up against him like she was made for the broad slope of his chest – her fingers sliding into his hair like the size of her hands were measured and fit for precisely this. 

It’s a rush of sensation and thrill and delight like nothing she’s ever felt before. And yet it’s also… as natural and comforting as her own heartbeat. 

Ben’s lips draw back to kiss across her mouth – tiny gentle pecks until he murmurs into the corner of her lips, “And did every boy since then make you feel like that?”

Rey squeezes him a little closer, where her arms are still twined around his shoulders. 

“No,” she breathes. “Nothing like that.”

Ben draws back just a fraction of an inch, even as his arms still keep her pressed close against himself. His eyes search hers, a heat and focus building there that makes Rey never want to let him go.

“If you were in Poe’s place, then you know everything.” 

Ben’s low voice sends heat rippling across her skin. She can’t fight her shudder when the words drift back to her. 

Her own words. 

_“She would want you so bad, Ben. Want you to fill her up with every last bit of this beautiful cock.”_

Rey looks between his eyes, and knows the same words are echoing inside his own head right now. She knows they’re both remembering what the words did to him – what they’re doing to both of them right now.

_“She’d feel you so deep, you’d be her entire world.”_

Under her hands, Rey can feel Ben’s breathing escalating. She can feel his wide shoulders lifting higher and faster as embers kindle in his eyes; his gaze all but devouring her. 

With her last bit of rationality, Rey manages her one lingering question: “Why – with Poe?”

Ben blinks, needing a moment to manage his reply. “I told you – I was sure this would never happen. You’d never waste your time on me. Poe asked if I wanted to try, the night after we learned about how coupling influences our magic. I’d been with guys too, in the past, and I was desperate for anything that might help me channel my power. 

“But it was just… just messing around. You were there.” Ben’s eyes flash at that. Not in anger or betrayal, but just in pure _heat_ that makes it hard to breathe, when his massive hands at her waist reel her in even tighter. “It had nothing to do with how I’ve never once been able to catch my breath around you. How I still can’t, right now… _Rey_, if I can’t touch you…”

“_Touch me_,” Rey begs, her lips right against his as her words morph into messy kisses. She smears the appeal all across his mouth. “Touch me. Take me. As you and me, this time. I want you to be the one spreading me open and I want to call your name until I’m hoarse and…”

Ben’s hands scramble from her waist down to her hips, drawing her up tighter until her feet are lifted clear off the floor. Rey’s arms lock around his shoulders in response, holding herself right there with her forehead against his and her lips a mere feather’s width from his. 

She can practically _taste_ his words when he murmurs in a strained rasp, “I can’t believe that was you. Last time. That was you – inside me.”

“Yes,” Rey breathes, lips just barely brushing his as her breath escapes like sparks, tingling from the inside out. “You felt so good inside, silky and so hot and it just kept getting better, the deeper I went.”

Ben’s backing her against the wall now, his hands sliding inelegantly to her ass, gripping the smooth swell while guiding her legs upwards. Rey hooks her thighs at either side of his hips at the same time her back hits the wall. 

“It was the best it’s ever been,” Ben grinds out in a whisper. 

“I could have fucked you for hours…” Rey has to pause between frantic, hungry kisses that are unfinished, loud, and wet in their haste to taste _more_. “The way you moaned and trembled… how you melted apart for me.”

A soft growl rises from Ben’s chest as his teeth nip at Rey’s bottom lip. 

“Need to get as deep inside you as I possibly can. I’m going to spread you open and make you cry my name and kiss you _everywhere_… Like you said you wanted.”

“I want… I want, Ben,” Rey barely manages, through the need to keep tasting his tongue between each phrase. “I want everything.” His tongue brushes hers and she sucks it into her own mouth. “I want _you_.”

“Going to give you _everything_.”

Ben’s lips slide down along her neck as he lifts her from the wall to carry her through the doorway of her bedroom. Rey barely has the presence of mind to push the door shut behind them, with Ben’s lips sucking just beneath her ear and one of his hands smoothing back and forth along her thigh. 

He spills her on her bed and follows her down – keeping his place right between her thighs as his hips already push mindlessly against where she’s so unbearably hot inside her jeans. 

Rey takes true delight in pulling the clothes from Ben’s body. All over again, she’s spellbound by how much of him there is. He sits up above her so she can pull his shirt off over his head. He rolls his shoulders, lowering his arms slowly back to Rey’s body as she tosses his shirt away. She can’t help reaching up to smooth her palms across the expanse of beauty-marked skin. 

Rey saw them all before, but not like this – not in still, solid detail when there’s nothing stopping her from touching and marveling. Not when she’s seeing just how very tiny her hands look in comparison, sliding their way down to thumb his nipples. 

A soft hiss escapes him, which only escalates when Rey leans up to brush her lips across the moles and freckles splashed across his right pectoral. She remembers how very pink and tight his nipples looked as she fucked deeper into him. Her head spins as she discovers the little buds are practically candy in her mouth.

Ben makes an urgent, strangled sound vaguely reminiscent of her name. His hands pull at her shirt, and Rey lifts her arms to give him his turn to undress her. Ben takes immediate advantage, his grasping, eager hands moving straight to Rey’s bra as soon as her shirt is done away with. 

He’s urging her down to her back the second her bra is gone. He bends close over her as his mouth takes all of her left breast that will fit. Rey breathes deep and slow, pushing her fingers up into Ben’s hair as his tongue swirls her nipple and his lips suck and suck and keep sucking everywhere they can reach. Ben’s hair is just as soft and thick as she fantasized, and finally feeling it between her fingers is alone almost enough to make her break apart. Her head is spinning like she can’t get enough air, when Ben switches to devouring her other breast while his fingers twist and pluck at the nipple slick from his mouth.

It doesn’t matter. Rey doesn’t need air – she needs to be naked _now_. She needs Ben between her thighs again. 

Rey releases a pointed whimper as her hands start fumbling with the buttons of her pants between their bodies. 

Ben’s hair brushes her stomach as he shakes his head slightly. 

“That’s for me.”

He bats her hands away, but before Rey can make any sound of frustration he already has the button open and the zipper down. 

“You have no idea how many times I’ve imagined this,” Ben breathes, expression strained as he pushes the waistband and underwear down from her hips in tandem. “In my head I’ve done this a hundred times but there’s nothing like…”

His expression is nothing short of wondrous, when Rey is completely naked and he hooks his hands under her thighs to ease them up, then open. 

“This… I could never have imagined.”

Rey can _feel_ herself throbbing. She’s so turned on she feels like her body could give off sparks. She takes in the bewitched expression on Ben’s face – the utterly singular possession she holds over him right now, and it just gets _worse_. She whines as she feels a trickle of slick dribble out from her. 

Ben curses, raspy and deep. His voice is black as night when he murmurs, “I’m going to taste you now.”

“Yes, Ben. As much as you want.”

He sinks down to his elbows, Rey’s thighs over his shoulders. Then his lips are pressed right to where she’s hot and pulsing, and the rest of the world whites out. 

Rey knows from a distance that the whimpering sounds thickening the air are coming from her, but the waves of bubbling bliss uncoiling from between her legs make her float far beyond her body. She knows only the caress of those lips that long ago took up permanent residence in her mind. She knows only the brush of open-mouthed kisses against her entrance – the warm, gentle sweep of tongue gathering all her slick. Then there come the lips sealed around her clit, sucking while his tongue strokes in between, and Rey’s hands pull hard in his hair as she sobs. 

Ben resurfaces, breathing hard and mouth shiny. 

“I want to eat it all, Rey. All of you.”

He parts her wider with his fingers and licks across once more, just to watch the tremor roll through her. He lets his tongue linger at her clit, watching her face contort with pleasure and her mouth tremble as he swirls little circles around it.

With effort that seems painful, Ben makes himself draw back.

“It’s my turn. I have to know how you feel inside.”

Rey nods immediately, refusing to let Ben out from between her legs even as he fights his way out of his jeans and boxers. He’s finally as naked as she is and _fuck_, she forgot exactly how huge he is, when he’s hard and flushed and leaking. 

Even when she used Poe’s hands, it was hard to fit her fingers all the way around him. Her mouth goes dry, licking her lips as she imagines that entire length working her open to make room for him inside her.

With her final vestige of sense, Rey remembers the spell she came upon weeks ago by chance and murmurs the words. 

Ben’s breath hitches when he feels her magic work some effect upon him. He looks to her eyes. 

“What was that?”

“Contraceptive spell,” she replies with perhaps a touch of pride. 

He breathes again like a laugh. When his eyes meet hers, they’re shining with fond wonder.

Then he leans in, and it makes Rey’s head spin to see that he’s so terribly desperate for _her_ and it’s her name he’s whispering with need in his voice as he gently parts her thighs wider. 

Rey reaches for him, hands skimming along his shoulders and down his back.

“You’re the only one – the only one I ache for inside and I’ve wanted it so _bad_ and for so long… That’s the only reason why I… I had to have you any way I could, even if…”

“Shh,” Ben soothes as he settles into place between her legs and the head of him brushes against where she’s wet and dripping. “It’s just us now.”

He bends to kiss her face. “Tell me if it’s too much. If it hurts.”

Rey twines her ankles together at his lower back. She lifts at the shoulders so she can press her mouth to his fully. 

“It won’t,” she whispers as she settles back again, her eyes locked with his. 

Ben holds her gaze, his hair sweeping across his eyes and focus riveted on her for any slight sign of discomfort as he begins to push in. 

Rey emits a breathy sound that flutters straight down Ben’s spine as she stretches around the wide head of his cock. He starts murmuring her name interspersed with endearments, his lips brushing her jaw and his body trembling with the effort of restraint. She whines high in her throat, legs hitching up higher on either side of Ben’s waist in an effort to make more room for him inside her. She breathes quick and shallow as Ben nudges inside little by little. 

Each roll of his hips and additional inch that slips inside her sets off a subsequent sequence of gasps and entreaties from Rey.

“Want to feel _all_ of you, need you filling me until I’m more you than myself…”

Ben groans from somewhere primal. He gives an experimental nudge of his hips, testing the lingering resistance. Rey begs his name again. He reaches down to adjust her legs around him so he’s angled just right.

He covers her mouth with his and then his hips sink forward all the way. A sharp, keening “_Oh_” jolts from Rey, and Ben kisses the exclamation straight from her lips. 

He can’t _breathe_ – it’s so tight and blinding with Rey blotting out all his senses; her body swallowing him whole and delivering him somewhere beyond comprehension. As if he’s just cast himself headfirst into the exquisite, devastating heat of her sun.

A tiny whimper escapes Rey as she shifts her hips. Ben is _everywhere_ and all of her senses are completely overwhelmed – so stimulated she can barely tell pleasure from saturation. Her mind is struggling to process what it is she’s feeling, when she’s stretched open so wide and gaping, her body helpless to do anything but shudder and clench weakly around the thick length buried all the way inside her – brushing places that set off alarms in her head and sparks before her eyes.

Then, Ben withdraws just a few inches. Rey revels in the pretty moan he makes, until he slides all the way back in and this time sets off a conflagration against some flint inside her she’ll never understand. Rey whines, and when Ben withdraws and then hits the same spot again, she cries out.

Once Ben hears the exultation in her voice, he finally lets himself go. Everything else in his entire world filters out but the weeks, _months_ he’s spent dreaming of this girl. Sighing after her and fantasizing not only about kissing her lips and what might be beneath her clothes – but the ridiculous things too. Like bringing her dinner after a long day, or buying her flowers, or simply making her laugh.

He didn’t often fantasize about the details of this. It hadn’t felt right, and besides, it would have been utterly impossible. There are no words for this. Now he knows, it would have been a hopeless effort. To try to imagine the way her inner walls would embrace him and pull him deeper. How delicate and hot and very, very wet she would be. How she would bite her lip around a gasp each time he pressed into her, eyes squeezed shut, then surrender soft sounds of loss each time he withdrew while her fingers pressed more tightly into his back. 

Ben keeps changing the angle of his hips – each time hungry for the moment when he’ll hit a particularly sensitive spot and Rey’s mouth will fall open in a choked-off cry of his name while her legs shake on either side of him. 

Ben’s senses are in over drive. Every nerve in his entire body is firing, struggling to process the intensity of everything flowing into him through the repeated clench and release of Rey’s cunt. 

Rey’s voice shakes from above him. 

“I think I was made for this.”

Now Ben has picked up the pace and they’re moving together. Rey rocks her hips down to meet each of his thrusts, and each time he hits somewhere inside her that makes her see stars, her magic overflows in the overwhelming surge of it all. 

It’s nothing like how it felt to be with him before. The sensory overload she felt through Poe’s body – no matter how forceful and sweeping – was nothing like the shape of Ben filling every groove and crevice that makes up the shape of her. Each time he slides inside makes shuddering sparks tear through her. When she manages to open her eyes and find his, he’s watching her with the warmth of a blaze on the longest night of the year. 

Rey hears him whisper her name, faint but repeatedly as he pushes into her just a little deeper – his hips straining to reach as far inside as he can – and she cries out as she grips tight around him. Her pleasure mounts fast, building in force and dislodging her power in its wake. Rey feels it beginning to rush from her body, but she exerts no effort to call it back. She can think of nothing but the sweet, devastating slide of Ben in and out of her – filling up her whole body just within the boundaries of _too much_. Like she was made just to hold him. Her magic dances out to twine around him, to swirl in delight as Rey gasps his name and holds him tighter.

It takes Ben several seconds to realize the supernatural heat suddenly flowing through him is coming from Rey. When she slides a hand to his face to frame it with her fingers, he sees the faint glow seeping from her skin. Struck, he looks up to her face and finds her hair floating off the pillow. When she opens her eyes to look back at him, they are very, very bright. 

Ben’s hips stutter for a moment – caught off guard by her might and her power rising to entwine with her pleasure.

“Beautiful. You are so, so beautiful.”

Then the words are out of his mouth and he’s kissing her again as he moves inside her with renewed vigor. He suddenly feels his own power rising to meet hers. The aura of her magic is intoxicatingly potent, but his own begins to unfold without a sign of fear – as if it implicitly knows mingling with Rey’s is where it belongs; as if it senses Ben himself was the one who incited her magic to flow out freely.

Ben feels the warmth of Rey’s magic all along his skin. Feels it caressing down his arms and along his thighs. 

“So close, Ben,” Rey gasps in almost all breath. Ben sees her features twist in lovely torment, feels her tensing and seizing up inside, and even as the intensifying tightness makes his breath cut out, his power surges up in a rush of strength to satisfy her. 

Ben plants his arms on either side of her and buries his face against her neck as he pumps into Rey with force he didn’t know he possessed. His magic sparks through his veins as the sweet cacophony from Rey’s body possesses him completely. 

Rey cries out her gratification as he pounds in harder and deeper. Her hands scrabble across his back as she struggles to hold herself together. Her body is almost flooded to the brim with pleasure and _Ben_ – while the magic leaking out of her makes her feel as if she could disintegrate, stretched in ten different directions until she feels infinite. 

Ben drives in at a particularly devastating angle and when he bottoms out, a spike in his magic collides with a whirl in hers and then Rey is shaking from head to toe, begging and pleading “Touch me, Ben, touch me touch me I need you _touch me_.”

He maneuvers a hand down between them. It doesn’t even matter that he can’t precisely find the right place immediately, or that his hips stutter and he chokes around each breath as he fights to hold back until Rey climaxes first. His hand is warm and so big – the only thing bigger is his cock that’s currently buried so deep inside her Rey can only see stars. His thumb only barely has to brush her oh-so-swollen clit before Rey free falls completely. 

For what seems a long time, Rey is aware of only two things. The first is Ben’s warmth – his breath against her ear, his trembling breadth all around her, and his spend contained by her spell but still warm within her. The second is her magic – humming in blissed contentment and pulling her along through one moment of wakefulness to the next. Once the blinding rush of her orgasm recedes, Rey’s magic nudges her back to proper consciousness. 

She opens her eyes to find Ben curled close around her. He’s on his side, with Rey maneuvered to face him. One of his hands is stroking hair back from her face. He smiles with one corner of his mouth when he sees her open her eyes. 

“I would ask if you’re okay, but your magic already answered that question.”

Her magic is still there, thrumming in the air around the both of them. She can feel it clinging to Ben, rubbing against him like an affectionate housecat. 

“Sorry – if it bothers you I can…”

“No, no, Rey. I adore it.” He smiles with both sides of his lips now, and leans in to kiss her mouth slowly and gently. 

Rey’s magic preens around them and they both pull back with matching laughs. 

“Your power is even more magnificent than I realized,” Ben murmurs, nose still nudging Rey’s. “It just came to life all on its own.”

“I felt yours here with us too, Ben.” She strokes her fingers through his hair, then slides her hand down the back of his neck. “I felt it well up in you towards the end.”

“It responded to yours. And it’s never felt… natural like that.”

Rey keeps her hand there against his neck, thumb stroking gently back and forth along his jaw as she watches his eyes take on a thoughtful look. 

“Usually it takes me ages to coax it out. It hides somewhere deep down like it’s afraid of the outside world, then when it finally emerges it’s angry and wild. The other day when you helped me with the life-giving spell… It emerged and obeyed in the end, but you saw how long it took. How hard it was for me.

“But this – I’ve never felt anything like it. It wanted to help me. It wanted to be with you just as badly as I do. It wanted to make you happy…”

Rey can’t help inching closer to him to press her lips to his. Her fingers tangle in his hair again as his arms slide around her. 

Ben presses an extra peck to her lips before he murmurs, “Was it really okay? It was good for you? I haven’t done this that much with girls before and – well, you saw that I’m not too experienced with taking control…”

Rey strokes the backs of her fingers down his cheek before resting them over his lips to quiet him. 

“Ben. It was perfect.” 

“Perfect?”

A small kiss. “Yes. Everything felt so different from last time, when I was Poe. I felt so close to you this way – like this is what we’re meant for. And now that I know it actually is me you wanted…”

“It’s been you – all this time. Just you.” His wide, warm hands slide slowly up and down her back. “I was just… shy and scared, I guess. Struggling with my power makes me feel pretty worthless sometimes, so I didn’t see why you would ever feel the same. With Poe it seemed easy in comparison – it didn’t mean anything, and maybe that’s why it never really affected my power. Not like the surge I felt with you, just now.”

“This meant something?” Rey asks softly, biting her lip lightly as she looks straight into his eyes. 

One of his hands trails up her back, then down along her side. “It meant everything. It was like nothing else in the world.” His thumb brushes across her hip. “When you said you thought you were made for this… It’s the same for me.”

Rey reaches up to trace the shape of his lips, entranced by how they quiver beneath her touch. She finds it suddenly difficult to swallow – her throat and entire being full of some enchanted helium, weightless and delirious. Slowly, her gaze traces up to Ben’s eyes, sparkling as they look at her. 

“It doesn’t matter that you struggle with calling up your power sometimes. It matches you, you know.”

“It matches me?” Ben echoes, brow furrowing.

“Mhm. It’s quiet most of the time. Protective of itself. Diffident. But when it’s finally nudged out; when it feels comfortable revealing itself…” Rey is tracing her fingers across the whole shape of Ben’s face now – down his nose, then fluttering across each cheek. He blinks with each soft brush of her fingertips.

“It’s beautiful. There’s no other word.”

Ben’s quiet for a moment, expression uncertain. Rey bites her lip as she withdraws her hand from his face. 

“Let me show you.”

Rey stretches out on her bed as she reaches across Ben. She extends her arm down over the side of the mattress, rooting around just under the edge. Her hand searches between the mattress and bedframe for a moment before she withdraws something in her grasp. 

She sits up beside Ben, cupping some small object in her hands. She gnaws on her bottom lip again as she looks up at him. He’s looking between her face and her cupped hands with open curiosity.

“It’s a bit embarrassing, but…”

Rey opens her hands. Inside is one of the small white flowers Ben conjured with his life-giving spell. The bloom is pressed and dried, but unmistakable. As is the care with which Rey handles it. 

Ben stares for a long time. Finally, he sits up beside her, moving to cup his own hands around Rey’s so he can look at the bud more closely. He called it into being with her help, and all this time she had kept it right here beneath where she sleeps each night. 

He finally looks up to her face, and he is at last smiling. Light and conviction glimmer in his eyes, as all the self-deprecating shadows finally clear. His smile is as easy as the breeze – the bend of his shoulders down towards Rey as natural and unburdened as the slope of a willow branch.

“I guess you really do like me.”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

Rey lifts a hand towards him, but the motion is arrested mid-air by a sudden ruckus out in the common area. 

The door abruptly bangs open and Poe appears, demanding, “Did you two finally do it?!”

Rey shrieks and dives for the blankets to cover herself. Ben splutters as he hurriedly stretches out to hide Rey from view. 

“What the fuck, Poe! Get out!”

Poe rolls his eyes, waving his hand dismissively. “Oh chill, Ben. I’ve seen all your goods and I’ve _been_ Rey’s goods. Did you do it or not?”

“Yes, we did it,” Ben huffs, exasperated. “Now will you leave before you ruin this for us?”

“Ruin this?” Poe spreads his hands in the air in a gesture of supreme affront. “And to think I was about to be selfless enough to offer my services for a threesome.”

Rey nearly chokes on her tongue. “No way!”

Poe frowns, looking genuinely put out. “You’re telling me that after I let you hijack my body, I’m now getting cut off from Ben’s sweet ass?”

“Yep,” Rey declares, crossing her arms and glowering from behind Ben’s shoulder. “That sweet ass is all mine now.”

Poe gapes between them. “Ben. Tell me it’s not true.”

Ben doesn’t look even remotely guilty. He just shrugs. “Sorry, man. Whatever she says goes. And besides,” he gives Poe a troublemaking, glinting smirk. “She fucked me better than you ever did.”

“Ugh. You’re just saying that because you’re whipped.” He gives Ben and Rey a vague, dramatic hand-wave of dismissal. “I regret walking into this sordid scene and am now removing myself from this toxic environment.” Poe pulls the door shut again behind him with a final wink and a quip of “Have fun, kiddos.”

Ben rolls his eyes as soon as the door’s closed again. “Such an ass.”

“He’s alright. He _did_ let me steal his body.”

Ben turns, his broad, bare body relaxing again. “So did you actually plan that with him?”

Rey flushes, her shame at the whole thing showing its head again. “No, no. He just figured out what I was thinking and… tacitly encouraged it.” She reaches out to trail her fingertips along Ben’s shoulder, then down one of his arms. “I guess since he knew you liked me too but you were unlikely to say anything, it might have been the only way to make this finally happen.”

Ben shifts closer to her. “You’re right. He’s very much alright.”

His fingers find hers and fold between them as his lips press to her mouth. Rey sighs into his kiss, slow and deep as her heart spins in her chest. 

After their lips slide apart, Rey lifts their twined hands between them. 

“I want to see you try a spell. After we were finally together as we’re meant to be – I want to see your magic come out.”

Ben looks slightly crestfallen. “Rey, what if…”

She hushes him quickly. She leans close so her soft words brush his face. “I felt your magic, when you were here with me. Inside me. I know you felt it too.”

“… I did.”

“You’re thinking you’re going to ruin things, if your power doesn’t come right away. But it doesn’t matter. It’s a part of you - and I want to be with all of you.”

Ben searches her face for a long moment. Until he’s really convinced – she would never judge him the way he always judges himself. Where he has always viewed his own power with censure, frustration, and shame; she sees only more of him to cherish.

Ben takes a deep breath, his gaze focusing again on where their hands are twined together. His fingers flex and tighten around hers. 

“How about the light-giving spell?” Rey suggests. “There’s no incantation for that one. You just feel it within you.”

Ben nods, attention still on their entwined hands. He remembers the spell from one of their first lessons. He remembers his disgrace as he attempted and failed over and over again. 

Thinking back to the instructions from the lesson, he closes his eyes. 

He centers himself, and imagines a source of light kindling and growing within him. He feeds it warmth – images of Rey’s smile; her shy look as she showed him the blossom he had created and she had treasured. 

Rey emits a loud intake of breath, and Ben opens his eyes. 

Pure white light is streaming from their entwined hands. Ben looks up in wonder, and finds the only brighter thing that could possibly exist is the smile streaming from Rey’s face.

A sudden feeling of weightlessness rushes over him. It’s something beyond his control, but not in the way that has too often caused him panic. This force is something gentle, tender. Ben doesn’t know exactly what it’s going to do, but he feels it surging out straight from his chest and somehow implicitly knows it can be trusted. 

It reaches for Rey in exactly the same manner his heart has been attempting for weeks from behind his ribcage. When it breezes through her hair, Rey’s face lights up all over again. She senses it immediately – Ben’s presence seeping into the air and twirling around her, even as he sits there motionless across from her. 

Rey squeezes his hand, from which light is still pouring to fill the room, and nudges down her inner barriers. 

The essence of her own magic leaps into the air – wild and undistilled and elated to mix with Ben’s. 

“They’re both so happy,” Ben murmurs, wondrous. Whenever his magic escaped from him before, it would wreak havoc. It would rampage until Ben begged it to return and it finally listened. Now – even though invisible to the eye – he can sense it capering with Rey’s. It nudges hers playfully until hers expands and captures it, then they wrangle and cavort until hers soars off and urges his to the chase.

Rey grins, feeling as if she’s the one glowing as she senses Ben’s magic tumbling with hers with every bit the same ease and lightness. As if, perhaps, all this time it was just waiting for companionship. 

“Yes,” Rey whispers, a moment away from Ben’s lips. “We are.”  


* * *

  
_EPILOGUE_  


Snow has just begun to fall across the stone steps and aged roofs of Columbia, where the New York Coven trains its children. On the steps outside the same building where Rey and Ben once lived some two decades before, an 11-year-old boy is crying.

A few other children around the same age pass by, gossiping or chatting about their latest lesson, but few notice the boy and even less bother to stop.

The boy doesn’t look up until he sees a pair of large, scuffed boots appear in front of him. He looks up – _very_ far up – to find a man in a heavy coat whose long, dark hair contrasts in opposites with the falling snow. His face is curious and gentle.

“Aren’t you cold out here without a coat?”

The boy shrugs. He looks away, quickly rubbing a fist across his eyes to clear the tears before they freeze on his cheeks. 

He doesn’t know who this man is, but he must be a member of the coven, seeing as this whole area of the campus is warded against the entry of unsuspecting humans. He wants to tell whoever it is to get lost, but knows offending a coven member would ruin his chance of ever joining – slim as it may already be. 

His face still turned away, the boy hears the man come sit down on the step beside him. 

“We didn’t start training so early, back when I joined,” the man offers. “I was nineteen when I came here. Stayed right in this same building.”

“Really?” the boy asks despite himself. He’s been fascinated with the coven history since he arrived. The idea of becoming part of something so rich in tradition, of joining a family of people like him that stretches back beyond human memory – he desperately wants to share in that sense of place and belonging.

“Yep. And we trained in the very same buildings as you. But I promise the dorms have been upgraded since then.”

The man sneaks the boy a smile. The boy sniffles but returns it. 

“So I don’t think the dorms are miserable enough to make you this upset. Do you miss your family?” 

The boy immediately shakes his head. “I’m 11, not 5,” he huffs. “I’m fine.”

The man seems to chuckle a little. “Alright, of course you are. And you’re fine with your training and classes, too?”

Now, the boy falls quiet. He looks away, gazing out across the quad as snowflakes make little piles on his shoulders. 

Gently, the man fills the silence, “This must be a lot for you to handle, training when your power maybe hasn’t fully manifested yet.”

The boy looks back to him, curious. “What do you mean ‘manifested’?”

“Well, we talked a lot about beginning the training at an earlier age, so it might be easier for children of the coven to adjust to life in the shadow world, instead of having to spend years waiting in the human world. But my power didn’t really become active until I was 13. I know I would have had a terrible time if I had to start so young. Even at 19, it was still incredibly difficult trying to tame my magic.”

The boy sits up, suddenly excited. “But I read that Coven Leader Rey’s decision to start the selection and training at younger ages was widely supported. A lot of other covens have done the same thing.”

Something he said makes the man suddenly smile. “Yes, you’re right. The whole coven supports the change, and I do think it was positive. I’m simply stating the fact that our power is more volatile when we’re younger. I remember sitting here in my classes, not able to conjure a single thing or do a single spell, and feeling so angry with myself every single day.”

The boy looks surprised. He hasn’t seen any of his fellow children struggle like that…

“Really? You’re a coven member now, even though it was hard for you back then?”

The man nods. He runs a hand through his black hair, shaking out the snowflakes. “It got better.” He looks off into the distance, smiling at something private. He looks back at the boy, his eyes warm. “But it can be difficult, at the beginning. Maybe your power has a mind of its own. It’s difficult to control and that makes you scared to let it out.”

The boy scuffs the bottom of his shoe across the step. “I’m not _scared_. I just… don’t know how to reach it sometimes. It all seems so easy to the other children, but I sit there in the back and can’t get anything to work.”

The man is quiet for a moment. The boy is sure he’s about to be laughed at, before the man begins, “One of my most embarrassing memories was the day when we were supposed to learn the life-giving spell. I sat there trying to make something bloom from this one tiny flower, staring at it for the whole lesson, and no matter what I did nothing would happen. Everyone else was mastering it. Flowers were sprouting up all around me. Rey was in my class, and she had this giant rosebush growing on her table that was probably taller than me.” The boy is turned sideways on the steps now, listening raptly. For the moment, he has forgotten himself. “But no. My power just refused to come out. A Coven Elder told me I shouldn’t feel bad, but of course I did.”

The man looks up, noticing the boy’s rapt attention. 

“But now? Watch this.” 

The man points ahead, towards the open quad before them. He keeps his hand extended for a moment, until impossible pink tulip bulbs begin to grow through the snow. 

The boy gasps, grinning. 

“How did you do that?!”

“You’ll do it, too. You’ll learn and eventually your magic will become your partner. I promise.”

Now, the boy’s expression veers towards sulking. “How can you promise that?”

The man falls quiet for a moment, expression hard to read. Finally, he seems to nod a little to himself.

“I’ll tell you what. First, you’re going to take this.” The man unzips and shrugs out of his coat, leaving a sweater underneath. He drapes it over the boy’s shoulders and it promptly engulfs his entire body. 

“When the weather gets warmer, the willow trees start blooming and you don’t need this coat anymore, you’ll return it to me, okay? And if your magic doesn’t feel easier for you by then, I’ll give you some lessons myself.”

Automatically drawing the warmth of the coat closer to him, the boy’s mouth falls open a little. 

“You will? But… I don’t even know who you are.”

The man gives a half smile. He holds out his hand. 

“I’m Ben. And you are?”

“Harry,” the boy replies, automatically reaching out to shake the proffered larger hand. His own unruly black hair tumbles into his eyes. His mind is whirling in an excited craze, trying to catch up to the name he just heard.

“Wait, wait. Are you…”

His question is cut off by an excited shriek from the direction of the quad. Two girls, a bit older but still in training, stop in front of the steps. 

“Um. Excuse me,” one stammers, giggling and nudging her friend with her elbow. “Are you Coven Elder Solo?”

Ben smiles, but it looks a bit more like a grimace in comparison to the friendly, effortless smile he’d sported a moment ago. 

“Yes, that would be me.”

Both girls collapse into fresh giggling. “We’ve hoped to meet you ever since we started training.”

“Well, uh, it’s lovely to meet you ladies.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I hadn’t been over here to the students’ quarter in a while, and I was in the area.” He reaches over to lay a friendly hand on the boy’s shoulder beside him. “Then I was talking with my friend Harry here.”

“Harry? Your friend?” 

The girls look between Ben and Harry, lingering on Harry with new appreciation. 

“Yes. I was just complimenting his new coat.” Ben shoots a grin at Harry, which the boy quickly returns. 

Before he stands to leave, Ben reaches over to pat one of the coat’s pockets. 

“If you ever need to talk…” Harry catches Ben’s eyes glimmer for a moment. When he reaches a hand into the pocket, his fingers brush a piece of paper. “You can call any time.”

Ben stands and steps from the stairs. 

“Ladies,” he acknowledges with a nod of his head before he walks off, hands folded into his pockets. 

As soon as he’s out of earshot, the girls both turn to Harry as if they’ve been friends their entire lives. 

“That was Ben Solo! He’s the Coven Leader’s life mate!”

“I know!” Harry responds excitedly. 

Harry burrows into the coat a bit, sinking one hand into the pocket to finger the scrap of paper Ben conjured there. The girls take a closer look at him.

“Why were you out here all by yourself, Harry? We were just heading to dinner. Why don’t you come?”

* * *

Walking off campus, Ben flicks open the mind channel Rey created between them years ago, after they became life mates in a ritual before the entire coven they now lead. 

_Sorry I’m late. I started talking to one of the younger children._

_You did? _

_A boy who was having trouble with his power. It was like looking in a mirror._

_I’ve got our table already but the representative from the California coven isn’t here yet. You can tell me about him._

_Alright. I’ll be there soon, love. Oh, and Rey – I’ll need to buy a new coat afterwards on our way home._

_You gave your coat to that boy, didn’t you?_

_You know me too well._

_And loved you too long. Though, Ben… thinking of you walking by our old training dorm reminds me of a certain way I haven’t loved you for a while now…_

_Do you remember the spell you used to use? To… outfit yourself? _

_Of course I do. So much simpler than that potion, and lets me stay in my own body._

_Then this meeting better wrap up quickly. Though I hope this doesn’t mean I haven’t been satisfying you lately. _

_To the contrary. I want to satisfy you just as thoroughly._

_I already am, every time. It doesn’t matter how. As long as it’s you._

_Alright, then let me be selfish and say that I want you that way again. _

_Then you can have me – that way or any way._

_I love you. And I love that you stopped to talk to that boy._

_He just needed someone to care, and assure him there’s nothing wrong. The same way I needed you. _

_But you still need me now, don’t you? After you’ve long mastered your power?_

_You know that answer full well._

_Perhaps you should remind me. _

_I’m just around the corner from the restaurant. The representative isn’t there yet, right?_

_No, he’s not._

_Then I will, in a moment._

_Hurry. I’ll be in the bathroom with a privacy spell ready. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There we have it! Somehow all that weird filth got a grossly soft ending :''') I've had the best time writing these two in this world, even though I still can't believe this story exploded to this length! "Write a quick kinktober" they said, "It won't take a lot of time," I told myself LIKE A FOOL. Ah well, I hope it was all worth it and you all enjoyed the ending! Let me know what you all thought! And how you picture Rey and Ben as coven leaders because I'm kinda soft for them!! :')
> 
> Here's my main WIP: The DC politics modern Reylo AU [Love It If We Made It](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19841884/chapters/46984972)  
(I've been working on it a lot the last couple days and an update should be coming!)
> 
> And my [tumblr!](https://xoruffitup.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Thanks for reading!!


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